Dr Faraz Hach

Dr. Hach’s main focus is the field of computational genomics and biomolecular sequence analysis especially in the context of cancer research. His research involves designing novel and high performance algorithms for analyzing large, high dimensional omics data produced by next-generation sequencing technologies. Recently, he is working on developing computational algorithms for the detection of aberrations using sequencing data obtained from tissue and liquid biopsies in order to understand clonal evolution in cancer genomes.

His earlier work on NGS mappings has been extensively used in the detection of copy number and structural variations in the 1000 Genome Project.  He is also a pioneer in the compression of genomic data and is one of the leading members of the MPEG-ISO sub-committee for the standardization of genomic data formats and compression. Moreover, he is part of the ICGC and the ICGC-TCGA Pan Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes consortia (PCAWG) which utilizes his tools to discover somatic structural variants in cancer genomes.

Dr. Hach’s research has been internationally recognized with number of awards and honors. These include the Ian Lawson Van Toch Memorial Award for an outstanding paper at the 20th Annual International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology and the Governor General’s Gold Medal for the best doctoral thesis award from Simon Fraser University in 2014.