Universite de Montreal awards the first Ph.D. in bioinformatics in Canada
Emmanuelle Permal became the first Ph.D. graduate in bioinformatics in Canada. Dr Permal did her doctoral thesis under the supervision of Prof. François Major, Director of the Laboratory of Bioinformatics and Theoretical biology (LBIT) at the Department of Computer Sciences and Operations Research and at the Institute for Research in immunology and Cancer (IRIC) of the Universite de Montreal.
Dr Permal's work on the 3D structure of RNA virus genomes was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. The results, obtained using tools that were developed at LBIT, revealed the existence of structural motifs that are essential to the survival of the hepatitis B virus, the A-type influenza virus and the bovine immunodeficiency virus. These motifs constitute novel therapeutic targets and could eventually be used to develop more efficient antivirals.
Bioinformatics is a relatively young field of multidisciplinary research that brings together biologists and computer scientists in an effort to model living structures and decipher biological information. Starting in the 1990's, this research field grew considerably as a result of the huge amount of data generated by the human genome project. The Universite de Montreal was the first Canadian university to offer both undergraduate and graduate programs in bioinformatics.
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