Philip Awadalla

Philip Awadalla is the Professor of Molecular Genetics at the Nuffield Department of Population Health, and Associate Director of the Big Data Institute at the University of Oxford. He is also a Status-Only Full Professor at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto. He is the National Scientific Director of the Canadian Partnership for Tomorrow's Health (CanPath), formerly the Canadian Partnership for Tomorrow Project (CPTP), and executive director of the Ontario Health Study. He was the Executive Scientific Director of the Genome Canada Genome Technology Platform, the Canadian Data Integration Centre. Professor Awadalla was also the Executive Scientific Director of the CARTaGENE biobank, a regional cohort member of the CPTP, This has included the first genetic maps and mapping of drug resistance genes in malaria.

In 2007 Awadalla, he became an associate professor in the department of pediatrics at the Université de Montréal, and in 2009 he became the Executive Scientific Director of the CARTaGENE Biobank of Québec. His research focused on developing next-generation genomics platforms to support to pediatric disease research and discovery of rare mutations.

Research by Awadalla (with Matthew Hurles of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute) was first to directly estimate the number of mutations passed on by individual parents to human offspring, fewer than was previously estimated. Other discoveries include large scale RNA methylation and its genetic control in human mitochondria and the impact of population size on negative selection in humans. The Awadalla team were also the first to show the impact of air pollution on gene expression and disease among thousands of individuals in the Quebec population.

Awadalla is part of a number of collaborative programmes, including the analysis and functional analysis groups of the 1000 Genomes Project and the Pan Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes Program.