Dr Stas Volik

Dr. Volik has 25 years’ experience working in the fields of bioinformatics, and human and cancer genomes. He was actively involved in the launch of the Human Genome Project in Russia, developing the first Russian whole-chromosome transcription map and the first relational molecular biology database in Russia. Since then he has developed a number of bioinformatics tools for genome analysis and visualization and applied them to study genome structure of breast, ovarian and prostate cancers. He played a key role in developing, patenting and implementing the paired-end sequencing approach for studies of cancer genomes and transcriptomes in close collaboration with Drs. C. Collins and Dr. J.W. Gray, a strategy that became fundamental for a vast majority of next generation sequencing studies. This paired-end sequencing approach led to the development of the first genome-wide sequence based map of a tumour genome (in collaboration with Drs. Pevzner and Raphael).

At the Vancouver Prostate Centre Dr. Volik’s current research focuses on the integrative studies of genitourinary cancers (prostate, bladder and kidney) using next generation sequencing technology. He manages numerous sequencing projects performed at the Vancouver Prostate Centre and oversees extensive collaborations with several sequencing centres, including the Vancouver Genome Sciences Centre and the Beijing Genome Institute. He is closely involved in the development of integrated pipelines for analysis of DNA-and RNA-Seq data from tumour samples, as well as in functionalization of the identified targets.

Dr. Volik has co-authored multiple peered-reviewed papers and shares a US patent on paired-end sequencing.