YegBUG Team
Meet the team behind Edmonton's bioinformatics community.
YegBUG Team
David Wishart, PhD
Director
Distinguished University Professor in the Departments of Biological Sciences and Computing Science, adjunct professor in the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences and the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine
Dr. David S. Wishart (PhD Yale, 1991) was born and raised in Edmonton and identifies as Metis. He is Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Since 1995, he has been a professor at the University of Alberta. Currently, he is a Distinguished University Professor in the Departments of Biological Sciences and Computing Science with adjunct appointments in the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences and the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine.
His research interests are broad and include metabolomics, analytical chemistry, food chemistry, natural product chemistry, molecular biology, protein chemistry and neuroscience. He has developed several widely used techniques using NMR spectroscopy, mass spectrometry, liquid chromatography and gas chromatography to characterize the structures of both large and small molecules. He has led the "Human Metabolome Project" (HMP), a multi-university, multi-investigator project that catalogued >250,000 human metabolites in human tissues and biofluids.
Mark Berjanski
Co-Regional Coordinator
Mark received a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Missouri-Columbia, USA, in 2002, where he studied the structure and dynamics of oncoviral proteins with high-resolution NMR methods. Mark conducted his post-doctoral research of protein structural biology in University of Michigan, USA, and then joined Dr. Wishart's group at University of Alberta, Canada, to work on data analysis and software development in the fields of metabolomics, NMR, and protein structure and dynamics.
Robyn Woudstra
Co-Regional Coordinator
Robyn is a research assistant at the University of Alberta's Wishart Lab, where she combines her diverse skill set in computing science, bioinformatics, and creative design to contribute to research projects. She received a BSc. in Computing Science with a minor in Bioinformatics from the University of Alberta in 2024, following her earlier education in graphic design and advertising at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology in 2017. Passionate about community engagement and scientific literacy, she holds volunteer positions with a variety of local organizations.