Science New Professor Lecture

Abstract

Translating research innovations in genomics into regulatory toxicology applications

International regulatory authorities face an urgent need to dramatically improve the efficiency of toxicological assessment of environmental chemicals to address the thousands of legacy chemicals in our environment and the hundreds of new substances produced annually. In parallel, global efforts are striving to dramatically reduce, and in some sectors entirely eliminate, the use of animals in toxicological testing. Genomics has been at the centre of these efforts over the past decade or more. In this presentation I will discuss how my laboratory is pairing state of the art genomic technologies with powerful bioinformatic tools to inform the molecular alterations induced by chemical exposures in rodent models and human cells. Our tools include transcriptomic biomarkers that accurately predict toxicological effects, error-corrected next-generation sequencing for mutation analysis, and new analytical pipelines for data interpretation in a risk assessment framework. I will discuss how we are defining context of use of our new tools, undertaking validation exercises in multi-sector partnerships, and building confidence in use through case studies undertaken with regulatory partners. The work sets the stage for risk assessments of the future.

Biography

Carole Yauk was the lead scientist of the Genomics Laboratory in the Environmental Health Science and Research Bureau at Health Canada for 18 years. She joined the University of Ottawa’s Department of Biology as a professor in September 2020, where she holds the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Genomics and the Environment. Her research broadly focuses on the development and implementation of genomic tools for human health risk assessment of environmental chemicals. She is involved in various international committees to advance the use of genomics, including within the Health and Environmental Sciences Institute (HESI) Emerging Systems Toxicology in the Assessment of Risk (eSTAR) and Genetic Toxicology Technical (GTTC) Committees. She currently serves as vice-chair of the Board of Trustees for HESI.

She is also involved in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Extended Advisory Group for Molecular Screening and Toxicogenomics since 2012. At present, she is co- chairing the development of the OECD’s Omics Reporting Framework. She is Past-President of the Environmental Mutagenesis and Genomics Society and an editorial board member of several journals focused on mutagenesis and genetic toxicology. In her spare time, she’s an avid snowboarder, rock climber, and runner, who’s frustrated that her children are now better at these sports than she is.

Abstract

StatisticalMethodsforCorrelatedOutcomes:Applicationsin Biomedical Sciences

My program of research is broadly classified into two main categories: methodological research, where we focus on developing and evaluating statistical methods, and applied interdisciplinary research, where we collaborate with clinicians and other experts in biomedical sciences. Our team is particularly interested in statistical methods used in the analysis of correlated outcomes including multivariate methods useful in analysis of longitudinal data, growth curves and other response curves. Other methodological interest and contributions include methods for integrating data from multiple sources and studies, with special focus on evidence synthesis methods. Evidence synthesis methods are one of the most commonly used statistical methods in clinical medicine and are considered to be the corner stone of evidence-based medicine and evidence-informed decision making - meta-analytic techniques are utilized, where direct and indirect evidence from randomized control trials (RCTs) and observational studies are integrated/synthesized to evaluate the comparative effectiveness and safety of two or more interventions. In this presentation, I will provide a brief overview of some of our methodological contributions in multivariate growth curves and network meta-analysis, including our recently published methodological work on evidence synthesis of multiple interventions and multiple correlated outcomes. I will also provide a few highlights from our collaborative applied research, including our recent contributions in pediatric medicine.

Biography

I was born and raised in Ethiopia and completed my undergraduate studies (double major in statistics and computer science) at Addis Ababa University. I traveled to Uppsala, Sweden, to pursue my graduate studies, where I received my licentiate (MPhil) and PhD degrees in mathematical statistics, with specialization in multivariate methods. I moved to Canada in 2006, did my post-doctoral training at the University of Toronto, then another post-doc at the Hospital for Sick- Children, which mainly focused on methodological and applied research involving high-dimensional genomic data and methods for integrating heterogeneous data sets. Since then, I have held positions at public health agencies, major research and academic institutes across Canada including a faculty position at McMaster University. I joined the University of Ottawa in July 2020, where I am currently a Professor in the Department of mathematics and statistics.