James Denvir

The study of complex diseases uses molecular approaches to address several interrelated questions on the development and underlying environmental and genetic causes of disease. Due to the complexity of these questions, and of the data generated in answering them, it is no longer feasible to achieve these aims by addressing them from the perspective of a single field of research. Consequently, we need teams of researchers with expertise in their own fields and the ability to communicate and collaborate with those outside of their fields of research.

My role in this research is as a biostatistician and bioinformaticist. As a collaborator, I aim to maintain an understanding of statistical techniques, to determine which of those techniques are best applied to complex bioinformatic problems, to maintain the technical skills to perform those analyses, and to present and communicate the results to the research community at large. A key aspect to this collaborative research, is the ability to communicate with researchers outside one's own field; both in terms of understanding the research being performed in the lab, and in terms of being able to explain the choices behind the analyses being used and their results. On occasion, it may be necessary to develop novel statistical techniques in order to perform the analyses required for a particular project.

In addition to biomedical bioinformatics I recently have collaborated on several studies of evolutionary genetics in non-model organisms and look to continue this collaborative work studying the genomics of wild birds and mammals.

August 2017