Carl Virtanen
Bioinformatics Manager
Carl Virtanen received his M.Sc. in Theoretical Biology from the University of Guelph in 1995. Before joining the UHNMAC 5 years ago, he worked at Chugai Pharmaceuticals in Tokyo, Japan as a bioinformatics research scientist in the Gene Discovery and Signalling Division. Carl has extensive experience with microarray data analysis and the integration of genomic and biological information with the use of bioinformatics tools. He has published 9 papers and 3 book chapters specifically on microarray data analysis. Carl has a broad base of skills: working as a professional programmer, acting as a bioinformatics consultant, and in designing high-performance computational clusters and databases for dealing with large datasets. He is well versed and passionate about biology in general and its application to medicine. Carl is particularly interested in cell signaling, genomics, and evolutionary theory. He currently oversees the analysis of all customer data from microarrays at the UHN Microarray Centre and manages and directs a core group to handle the large throughput at the Centre.
Zhibin Lu
Bioinformatician
Zhibin Lu holds two M.Sc. degrees, one in Bioinformatics from the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia and another in Biochemistry at Jilin University, China. His main duties are acting as systems manager of the Microarray Centre's computer cluster, maintaining and developing mySQL databases, programming, and data analysis. He has developed several projects including online clone database search engines, the UHNMAC tutorial registration system and the laboratory information management system (LIMS) for array production. He is proficient at several programming languages such as Java, Perl/bioPerl, c/c++, R, and PHP. Before joining the UHNMAC, he had worked in both research labs and on bioinformatics programming at the Chinese Academy of Science, the University of Toronto, the Children¹s Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of North Carolina.
Waterloo Co-op Program
Every 4 months, we have two students from the University of Waterloo join us.
Dedicated coders, they help Carl and Zhibin program databases, software,
searches, and utilities such as the web pages you are looking at right now.
Without them, we would be unable to keep up with all the analyses!