Chad Liang

Position: Research Scientist Professor (Epidemiology of Infectious Diseases); NSERC Industrial Research Chair in Infectious Diseases of Dairy Cattle

Institution: National Centre for Animal Diseases Lethbridge, Canadian Food Inspection Agency; Adjunct in the Department of Biological Sciences, University of LethbridgeFaculty of Veterinary Medicine, University of Calgary

Role with AMR - One Health Consortium: Co-Investigator, Scientific Director

Dr. Chad Laing received his PhD in Biomolecular Sciences, with a specialization in Bioinformatics, in 2013 from the University of Lethbridge. He is currently a Research Scientist with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, at the National Centre for Animal Diseases, Lethbridge Laboratory. From 2016 - 2018, he was a Research Scientist with the Public Health Agency of Canada in Lethbridge, Alberta, where he led predictive genomics research on food- and water-borne bacterial pathogens. Chad has dealt extensively with molecular biology, bacterial genomics, bioinformatics, and software development. He is the author of the pan-genomics software suite Panseq, a platform for single-step pan-genomic analyses of bacterial genomes. He also led the development of SuperPhy, an online webserver and integrated graph database for real-time prediction of bacterial phenotypes and downstream comparative analyses. His current work uses machine-learning models to predict bacterial phenotypes such as virulence to humans, and antimicrobial resistance, from whole-genome sequence data. He has supervised over 30 undergraduate students, two MSc candidates, and a post-doctoral fellow. Current research interests include using genomics to study bacterial pathogens affecting human and animal health, as well as those affecting the safety and security of Canadians.

Key Areas of Expertise: Genomics, machine learning, bioinformatics, microbiology