Nominee: Athanasios Zovoilis
Associate Professor, University of Manitoba
Brief Biosketch provided for the nominee:
Starting January 2024, Dr. Zovoilis is an Associate Professor of Bioinformatics at the University of Manitoba, which he joined from the University of Lethbridge, where he has been a Canada Research Chair in RNA Bioinformatics and Genomics. He has been the Director of the Southern Alberta Genome Sciences Center (SAGSC) as well as the academic director of SAGSC’s bioinformatics core facility and platform and he has been recently appointed the director of the bioinformatics platform at the Cancer Care Manitoba Research Institute. He has also been the academic lead of the Genome Canada supported Alberta Bioinformatics Network (BioNet) that initially included the three main Alberta research intensive Universities and subsequently the academic lead of its expanded form, BioNet Prairie. Dr. Zovoilis has contributed to our understanding of the role of non-coding RNAs in cell function and human disease and his studies include leading author publications in Journals such as Science, Cell, EMBO Reports and PNAS that have been highly influential and widely cited in the fields of RNA Genomics.
Justification provided for the nominee:
Dr. Zovoilis has been a founding member of RNA Canada and chair of the Research Funding Coordination Committee. As member of the initial C2R2 steering Committee (subsequently transformed to board of directors of RNA Canada) he has provided to the committee administrative resources during the first year of its operation. As chair of the Research Funding Coordination Committee he has contributed to the generation of the RNA Canada’s current grants database and the current coordination of a number of research funding initiatives.