Join the lab

The lab sits inside a federal research centre, which changes the shape of what is on offer. Although we don’t provide graduate admissions directly, you can work with us using the [Research Affiliate Program[https://www.canada.ca/en/public-service-commission/jobs/services/recruitment/students/research-affiliate-program.html)

Students

We take undergraduate co-op students, summer students and honours projects, and co-supervise graduate students with university supervisors. Past projects have run from pedigree visualisation to genomic selection pipelines to real-time nanopore analysis.

You do not need a genomics background. You do need to be comfortable writing code, or willing to become comfortable quickly — most of what we do is programming applied to biological questions, and we will teach the biology.

Breeders and research scientists

If you have a data problem — a pipeline that only runs on one person’s laptop, a genotype file you cannot join to your field book, an analysis you would rather run yourself — that is the core of the job, not a favour. Get in touch early rather than after the data is collected; the design decisions that make analysis easy are usually made before anything is sequenced.

Collaborations

We work with groups across AAFC, universities and industry on diagnostics, population genomics and breeding informatics. If your problem sits somewhere between genomics and software engineering, that is generally where we are most useful.

Getting in touch

Email . For student enquiries, say what you want to work on and roughly when you are available — the CV can wait until the second email. For project enquiries, one paragraph on the biological question and one on what data exists is enough to start.

We are glad to hear from people whose route into computational work was not the standard one. If a formal requirement looks like a barrier, say so — it is often negotiable.