Apply and expand your knowledge and skills at the Wodak
Lab at The
Hospital for Sick Children, located in the Discovery District of downtown Toronto.
The lab's work environment is relaxed and casual,
placing an emphasis on learning and academic growth. Our research
combines the development of methods and software in the pursuit of
important bioinformatic problems related to human health, including:
- creating software to visualize and analyze biological
networks.
- simulating and modeling molecular interactions.
- developing quantitative and integrative computational
approaches for interactions, complexes and biochemical pathways.
As a student a the lab you will be working on
software for the visualization and analysis of biochemical networks
while at the same time extending your knowledge in a variety of
disciplines such as:
- bioinformatics
- computation and programming
- statistics
- biochemistry
- graph theory
- biological databases
- research processes and methods
You will also apply and gain technical experience
in such areas as:
- software design and object oriented programming
- Java
- web services
- high performance computing facilities such as clusters
- databases
- open source libraries (Grails, Sping, JQuery)
- applications (Eclipse IDE, R statistical software,
Cytoscape, MySQL)
As a research facility the Wodak Lab will also give
you many opportunities to see to work in the field through seminars and
lectures from people ranging from graduate students to Nobel laureates.
Students from the following fields are encouraged to apply:
- bioinformatics
- computer science
- software engineering
- applied mathematics
- computational biochemistry
Students of the University of Waterloo should apply
via the university's coop program.
Testimonials
Read what some of our previous co-op students had to say about their experiences at the
Wodak Lab:
James Gleeson
Honours Computer Science —
Specialization in Bioinformatics
University of Waterloo
I have had the freedom to explore industry-standard technologies in
Bioinformatics, and become familiar with research by investigating scientific
literature. Combine this experience with a group of talented researchers who
foster the development of your communication skills through constructive
criticism and encouragement, and you begin to have an idea of the potential in
working at Wodak Lab.
Under the guidance of my supervisor Andrei Turinsky and
everyone else at Wodak Lab, I independently researched recently published
algorithms in disease-gene prediction and applied my constantly expanding
technical toolset to develop software that implements and expands on these
algorithms. As I implemented features in my software, I had the opportunity to
share results they produced when run on real datasets obtained from popular
biological databases such as the Human Protein Reference Database (HPRD). This
gave me the opportunity to begin questioning the biological interpretation of
these results, which is an experience rarely explored at the undergraduate
level. Hence, for any student looking to take Bioinformatics beyond the
classroom, Wodak Lab is an environment where this is a guarantee.
Zahrah Khalid
Honours Computer Science —
Specialization in Bioinformatics
University of Waterloo
Joining the Wodak Lab as a Bioinformatics Research Trainee
has exposed me to the many facets of research and academia that are
often inaccessible to students at the undergraduate level. Not only have
I been given the privilege of attending numerous conferences, symposiums
and distinguished lectures related to my academic background and
interests in biochemistry and bioinformatics, but more importantly, I
have been given a chance to contribute my own research on metabolic
pathways to the scientific community.
Working under the direct supervision of Dr. Shoshana Wodak, I
have been encouraged to pose complex questions about the proteins that
drive many of the biological processes organisms use to sustain life,
and then further motivated to think critically about valid computational
techniques that can be applied to solve them. It has been a pleasure to
apply and make use of much of the theory I have absorbed in the
classroom, ranging from molecular biology to statistical analysis and
algorithms, to the real-world problems that arise in nature. Lastly, I
believe that the independence of working on my own project has given me
the confidence and experience that I think will prove to be invaluable
assets to an aspiring graduate student such as myself.
Steve Constable
Faculty of Science — Computational Science/Biochemistry
University of Waterloo
My work at the Wodak Lab involved doing real science: predicting
Gibbs free energy changes in biochemical reactions. I was responsible
for the entirety of my project, from the bottom up. I got first hand
experience working with open source software, including all of its
benefits and shortcomings. After more than 4 months of hard work and
several re-writes, my program is proudly generating all sorts of
thermodynamic data.
Working for the Wodak Lab has been an extremely positive
experience. Being in Toronto's Discovery district means there are
innumerable opportunities to attend academic seminars and symposia, and
I was actively encouraged to do so by my employers. Possibly the most
important aspect of work here was the use of industry-standard tools,
such as the Eclipse IDE, that we aren't exposed to at school. I
currently look forward to returning to the Lab for a third consecutive
work term, and the start of a new project.
