University of Alberta Team
David S. Wishart
Principal Investigator
Dr. David S. 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.
He has directed a number of core labs at the U of A, including the Faculty of Pharmacy's mass spectrometry core, the Polyomx bioinformatics core, and the Genome Canada Bioinformatics Help Desk. He led the Human Metabolome Project (HMP), which identified or found evidence for more than 8000 endogenous metabolites, archived in the Human Metabolome Database (HMDB).
The methods and ideas developed for the HMP helped lay the foundation for other metabolomic databases (DrugBank, T3DB, FooDB) and software tools (MSEA, MetaboAnalyst, MetPA, MetaboMiner).
Rupa Mandal
Wishart Node Manager
Education: Ph.D. in Analytical Chemistry, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
Research interests: Her research interests include metabolomics, specifically the development and adaptation of new metabolomic technologies for health, agriculture, and biological applications.
Eponine Oler
Junior Bioinformatician
Education: BSc in Biology and Bioinformatics – University of Alberta
Research interests: Her research interests include the development and improvement of biological databases, as well as designing web interfaces for those databases.
Jiamin (Tammy) Zheng
Sr. Technologist
Education: Msc in Chemistry, University of Alberta
Research interests: Her research interest is LC-MS-based metabolomics.
Mark Berjanskii
Research Associate
Mark Berjanskii is a Research Associate specializing in bioinformatics and computational biology. His work involves the development and management of major biological databases and software tools.
He has contributed significantly to projects such as NP-MRD (Natural Products Magnetic Resonance Database), MarkerDB (Molecular Biomarker Database), and research on protein structure determination and analysis.
Scott Mackay
Research Associate
Education: PhD in Biomedical Engineering, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta; BSc in Engineering Physics, Nanoengineering Option, University of Alberta
Research interests: His research interests include the development of portable and inexpensive sensing devices for metabolomic and other biosensing applications. He focuses on engineering devices and methods for making laboratory-based research more accessible and user-friendly.