31 July 2026Finlay Maguire was promoted with tenure to Associate Professor
8 July 2026Ash Porter, David Mahoney, Bonface Onyango were all selected to give oral presentations (with Precious Osadebamwen presenting a poster) at ZAMBI
7 July 2026Deanna Tait was selected to give an extended oral presentation on their Avian Influenza GWAS work at ZAMBI
6 July 2026We organised a new national ~160 person Zoonosis, AMR, and Bioinformatics conference: ZAMBI
28 April 2026Gustavo Sganzerla Martinez’s paper on mpox clade prediction was posted as a preprint on medRxiv
10 April 2026Work led by Lauren Crawshaw and Jeff Bowman on trying to find and characterise whether B.1.641 had formed a reservoir in wild deer was published in FACETS
5 March 2026Work led by the Brinkman lab characterising AMR mobility patterns across 8000 bacterial species was released on BioRxiv
15 February 2026Clayton Hall’s paper (supervised by Xena Li) evaluating genotype-phenotype correlation in beta-lactam/beta-lactamase inhibitor pairs in Pseudomonas was published in JID
12 February 2026Collaborative pre-print on H3N2 subclade K dynamics with Public Health Ontario was released on medRxiv
25 December 2025David Mahoney’s first PhD chapter benchmarking different methods for querying assembly graphs was released as a pre-print on BioRxiv
2 September 2025In work led by Dr. Stairs, our paper on the primary management for stress urinary incontinence by socioeconomic status was published in JOGC
10 May 2025In work led by Luis Pedro Coelho’s group we published a tool called ArgNorm in Bioinformatics which annotates hAMRonized AMR gene prediction tool output to CARD’s Antibiotic Resistance Ontology
26 April 2025Jon Kotwa and Akrabed Bhuinya’s work discovering and characterising the genome and virology of novel alphacoronaviruses in Canadian big brown and little brown bats was published in npj Viruses
15 March 2025Our latest mixed-method sociological paper with Dr. Mike Halpin was published in Sociology of Health * Illness
24 February 2025Long-running work with Samira Mubareka’s group on SARS-CoV-2 animal model characterisation was published in NPJ Viruses
13 February 2025Joe Zeppa (clinical microbiology resident)’s work characterising invasive group A Streptococcus was published from our clinical lab in ASM Microbe.
19 January 2025Malcolm Tait has been appointed awarded a scholarship as part of the inaugural cohort of the Canadian One Health Training Program for Emerging Zoonoses (COHTPEZ)
01 January 2025Dr. Angela McLaughlin started in our lab (jointly with Dr. Zvonimir Poljak at Ontario Veterinary College) to work on predictive approaches for host changes in Avian Influenza
01 September 2024The Pathoplexus database was featured in a news article in Science
28 August 2024With international colleagues including PHA4GE and Nextstrain initiatives, we have developed the Pathoplexus a new open-source specialised database for human viral pathogens of public health importance
19 August 2024Fin Maguire was announced as the winner of 2024 Discovery Award in the category of Emerging Professional.
13 August 2024The Canadian One Health Training Platform on Emerging Zoonoses training grant was also funded by CIHR for 6-years. This grant will provide a ton of new training opportunities for graduate students working in this area including lab exchanges and an annual symposia with CAN-AMR-NET.
17 May 2024Dr Michael Halpin and Dr. Maguire received a SSHRC Insight Grant to expand their work around online radicalisation
10 April 2024Joe Zeppa (Clinical Microbiology Resident at SHL) presented our work on Group A Streptococcus at LMP Research Day in Toronto
17 February 2024Precious Osadebamwen has just started in the lab on an exciting project about automating triage of AMR results
26 January 2023The impressive Demeter Lockyer just published her honour’s thesis in Terrorism and Political Violence. This paper analyses online posts to discuss how incel’s position their violence as ideological terrorism.
8 January 2024The Canadian Review of Sociology has just published our paper with Mike Halpin investigating how online incel communities use the perpretaor of the 1989 Polytechnique massacre Lépine to further justify violence against women
12 December 2023Our latest PHA4GE Data Structures paper describing the Pathogen Data Object Model (led by Ruth Timme was published in Microbial Genomics.
17 November 2023Our collaboration with Mubareka and Doxey groups (among many others!) genomically and transcriptomically characterising deer immune response to delta spillover was published in iScience
7 November 2023Fin Maguire was awarded the 2023 President’s Research Excellence Award for an Emerging Investigator at the Dalhousie Legacy Awards 2023.
30 October 2023Ran the first PHA4GE Conference on the Cavalli Estate, Cape Town, South Africa (Steering Committee/Scientific Program).
26 September 2023Work led by Kuganya Nirmalarajah at Sunnybrook identifying limited additional antiviral resistance mutations in patients with shortened remdesivir courses was published in Influenze and Other Respiratory Viruses
30 July 2023Fin Maguire was announcted as a Finalist for the 2023 Discovery Awards in the category of Emerging Professional.
12 June 2023Dr. Halpin and Dr. Maguire wrote an op-ed for the conversation (syndicated to other news sites such as phys.org) on radicalisation and misogyny in the incel community.
9 June 2023We were interviewed by Melissa Healy for an article in the LA Times on the impact of animal reservoirs on the future of the pandemic.
01 June 2023With Dr. Halpin and our collaborators in sociology we published a large scale analysis of social media posting and misogyny amongst incel men in New Media and Society
18 April 2023We jointly ran a Canadian Bioinformatics Workshops on Infectious Disease Genomic Epidemiology: all the materials are open and can be found here
5 April 2023Gave a lecture on genomic epidemiology to the graduate Infectious Disease Epidemiology class (CHE6052)
30 March 2023Our lab had 5 pieces of co-authored work presented at AMMI/CACMID ranging from finding novel viruses in bats to genomically-informed investigation of mobile AMR genes
2 March 2023Released another PHA4GE pre-print developing quality control tags for public health sequencing datasets
30 December 2022Katherine Chan’s work (led by Dr. Jason Moffat) on using CRISPR to screen SARS-CoV-2 host factors was published in Heliyon
8 December 2022A pre-print led by Dr. Jocelyn Stairs evaluating the success of a ob/gyn clinic for refugee women in Halifax was released on ResearchSquare
29 November 2022A paper author with Dr. Mike Halpin and other sociology colleagues on the large scale analysis of misogynistic language use on an incel forum was released as a pre-print in SocaRXiv
28 November 2022Our work on reverse zooanthroponsis of COVID-19 from deer has been featured in an episode of This Week in Virology
10 November 2022Co-first authored manuscript on the detection and chracterisation of divegent COVID-19 in white-tailed deer with spillback into humans was published in Nature Microbiology.
9 November 2022Paper with Jocelyn Stairs and colleagues on urinary incontinence in women who haven’t given birth was published in Urogynecology
22 October 2022Work investigating the changing tropism/viral load of Omicron lineages was published in Open Forum Infectious Diseases
3 October 2022New pre-print released led by Dem Lockyear (as part of on-going collaboration with Dr. Mike Halpin) on the way in which a specific incel forum discuss/celebrate the mass killer Marc Lépine
18 June 2022Work generating benchmarking datasets at the PHA4GE/JPI-AMR/MRC-CLIMB hackathon in 2021 was published in Nature Scientific Data
16 June 2022Our group was awarded 2 SSHRC Insight Development Grants (details to follow after embargo is lifted)
10 June 2022Collaborative work led by Arinjay Banerjee looking at neutralisation across SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern has been published in Cell med
25 May 2022Jee-in Kim’s review on machine learning based antimicrobial resistance phenotype prediction was published in Clinical Microbiology Reviews
20 May 2022A case report led by Dr. Alice Zhabokritsky characterising a chronic COVID-19 infection associated with HIV was published in Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology
7 March 2022The SARS-CoV-2 deer research was featured in a joint WHO/FAO/OIE statement on the importance of wildlife surveillance during the pandemic.
26 February 2022Our pre-print identifying a new and very divergent SARS-CoV-2 virus in deer with a possible deer-to-human transmission was released (summarised here)
16 February 2022The PHA4GE SARS-CoV-2 metadata spec that we developed (and is used by INSDC databases) was published in GigaScience
01 January 2022Our research group at Dalhousie officially started jointly in Epidemiology and Computer Science
08 December 2021Invited presentation of the lab’s work on AMR metagenomics at the Seq4AMR grop meeting.
01 December 2021Some of work on radicalisation of incels was written about in the university newspaper
28 November 2021Our public health work during the COVID-19 pandemic paper has been featured in an article in the Globle & Mail Newspaper.
24 November 2021Dr. Peter C Jentsch has started a joint postdoctoral position with us and Samira Mubareka to investigate how well different public health interventions control SARS-CoV-2 variant dynamics in vulnerable populations.