Dr. Kim Solez

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Kim Solez is Professor of Pathology at the University of Alberta and co-founder of the Banff Classification, the first standardized international classification for renal allograft biopsies. He is also the founder of the Banff Foundation for Allograft Pathology. The Banff Classification, created in 1991 and updated in regular intervals, continues to "set standards worldwide for how biopsies from kidney and other solid organ transplants are interpreted". In 2010, Dr. Solez completed the Singularity University Executive Course, and in 2011 pioneered a unique graduate level medical course Technology and the Future of Medicine at the University of Alberta LABMP 590. Artificial intelligence and the creativity of young people are important themes of the course. 

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Dr. Jason Acker

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Jason Acker is currently appointed as Professor in the Department of Laboratory Medicine & Pathology in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry. Focusing his research on understanding the biological response of cells to freezing and freeze-drying has allowed Dr. Acker to develop a solid foundation from which he has contributed to the design of new methods for the long-term storage of a number of cell types and tissues. 

 In the area of transfusion medicine, Dr. Acker is a world leader in understanding the effects of blood component manufacturing and low-temperature storage on patient outcomes and has led many national and international efforts to improve the quality and safety of blood components. Dr. Acker’s blood services laboratory has responsibility for developing scientific and technical evidence to support innovative changes in blood product manufacturing, storage and utilization at CBS.

Dr. Bo Cao

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Trained in mathematics (BSc), psychology (MSc), computational neuroscience (PhD), neuroimaging and psychiatry (postdoc), Dr. Cao has a strong passion for understanding the fundamental mechanisms of how the brain works and how to cure the brain when the mechanisms are disturbed. As the Canada Research Chair in Computational Psychiatry (Tier 2), he is always seeking young talents to work with as graduate students (Masters and PhD) and postdoctoral fellows, who have a passion to learn more about the brain and mental disorders and to use their analytical expertise to help patients and clinicians. His main research interests are Computational Psychiatry and Precision Medicine in Mental Health, Brain Development and Aging, and Neuromodulation and Neurofeedback.

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Ishita Moghe

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Ishita Moghe is a graduate student in Neuroscience at the University of Calgary. She was the top student in the LABMP 590 course in the Fall of 2017 while at the University of Alberta. She worked with Dr. Solez as the first-ever “nephrology immersion” student in 2018 and 2019. During that time, the two created many educational videos and the subscription rate on Dr. Solez’s YouTube channel increased 7-fold. Their videos lodged complaints about inaccurate statements online about digital pathology and artificial intelligence. These videos were remarkably successful. Every fallacy they brought attention to was removed or corrected, even provoking statements by the Finnish Government and famous tech author Yuval Noah Harari. Ishita has continued to teach in LABMP 590 and present with Dr. Solez at international meetings while at the University of Calgary. She is one of the two teaching assistants for LABMP 590 in 2021.

Dr. Samina Ali

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Dr. Samina Ali is a pediatric emergency physician at the Stollery Children's Hospital and a Professor of Pediatrics and Emergency Medicine at the University of Alberta. Dr. Ali is a national award-winning researcher, mentor, and educator. She is currently vice-chair of Pediatric Emergency Research Canada (PERC), the founding co-chair of PERC's Pain Interest Group, and the Western Canadian lead for Solutions for Kids in Pain (SKIP), a national knowledge mobilization network. Her research program concerns better treatment of children in the emergency department, with a focus on responsible prescribing of opioid analgesia and the management of medical procedure-related pain. She holds national funding for studies informing best care for children with acute injury and illness. Her current focus is integrating digital technology and artificial intelligence into pain care.

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Dr. David Wishart

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Dr. David Wishart (PhD Yale, 1991) is a Professor in the Departments of Biological Sciences and Computing Science at the University of Alberta. He is also a senior research officer and the director of the Nano Life Science program at the NRC’s National Institute for Nanotechnology (NINT). He has been with the University of Alberta since 1995. Dr. Wishart has active research programs in structural biology, nanobiology, synthetic biology, prion biology, bioinformatics and metabolomics. Some of his lab's most significant contributions have been in the area of protein chemical shift analysis and the prediction of protein structure.

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Dr. Osmar Zaiane

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Dr. Osmar Zaïane is a Professor of Computing Science at the University of Alberta, and a fellow and CIFAR AI Chair with the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii). Dr. Zaiane obtained his Ph.D. from Simon Fraser University in 1999. He has published more than 300 papers in refereed international conferences and journals. He is Associate Editor of many International Journals on data mining and data analytics and served as program chair and general chair for scores of international conferences in the field of knowledge discovery and data mining. Dr. Zaiane has received numerous awards including the 2010 ACM SIGKDD Service Award from the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Mining, the organization responsible for the world’s premier data science, big data, and data mining association and conference.

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Dr. Hamid Tizhoosh

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Hamid R. Tizhoosh is a Professor in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Waterloo since 2001 where he leads the KIMIA Lab (Laboratory for Knowledge Inference in Medical Image Analysis). Before he joined the University of Waterloo, he was a research associate at the Knowledge and Intelligence Systems Laboratory at the University of Toronto where he worked on AI methods such as reinforcement learning. His research activities encompass artificial intelligence, computer vision, and medical imaging. He has developed algorithms for medical image filtering, segmentation, and search. As well, he has introduced the concept of "Opposition-based Learning".

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Dr. Raymond Ng

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Dr. Raymond Ng is internationally renowned for his data mining research. He has published over 180 peer-reviewed publications on data clustering, outlier detection, OLAP processing, health informatics and text mining. He is the recipient of two best paper awards – from the 2001 ACM SIGKDD conference, the premier data mining conference in the world, and the 2005 ACM SIGMOD conference, one of the top database conferences worldwide. For the past decade, he has co-led several large-scale genomic projects funded by Genome Canada, Genome BC and industrial collaborators. Since the inception of the PROOF Centre of Excellence, which focuses on biomarker development for end-stage organ failures, he has held the position of the Chief Informatics Officer of the Centre. From 2009 to 2014, Dr. Ng was the associate director of the NSERC-funded strategic network on business intelligence.