Dr. Mélanie Courtot
Director of Genome Informatics at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research,
Toronto, Canada
Assistant Professor in the Department of Medical Biophysics at University of Toronto,
Toronto, Canada
Source: Personal archive
"“WAYFIND-R aims to simplify access to high-quality data for cancer research, enabling timely and impactful studies that drive precision medicine forward. By generating real-world evidence beyond traditional clinical trials, it provides crucial insights for physicians and researchers. WAYFIND-R also promotes diversity in clinico-genomic studies, ensuring its data can be shared and reused globally to improve cancer care for diverse populations.”
Dr Mélanie Courtot is the Director of Genome Informatics at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research in Toronto, and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medical Biophysics at University of Toronto. Dr Courtot is passionate about translational informatics – building intelligent systems to gain new insights and impact human health. Her lab aims to build a globally shared knowledge ecosystem to advance science and improve health for all. Her team develops the Overture open-source software suite, which supports many active large-scale cancer genomics projects including the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) and ICGC Accelerating Research in Genomic Oncology (ICGC-ARGO), VirusSeq, and the upcoming Pan-Canadian Genome Library. It also drives the African Pathogen Data Sharing and Archive Platform.
Dr Courtot obtained her PhD in Bioinformatics from the University of British Columbia in 2014, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in Public Health. Dr Courtot co-leads the Clinical and Phenotypic workstream and Data Use and Cohort representation groups for the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) as well as cohort harmonization efforts for the International Health Cohorts Consortium (IHCC). She is an advisory board member for the Public Health Alliance for Genomic Epidemiology coalition (PHA4GE), European Open Science Cloud for Cancer (EOSC4Cancer) project and the eLwazi open data science platform.