Dr Deena Gendoo is an Associate Professor in Computational Biology at the Institute of Cancer and Genomic Sciences. Dr Gendoo obtained her PhD in 2012 at McGill University in Canada, and completed her postdoctorate fellowship at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in Canada. Over the course of her career, she has developed extensive expertise in bioinformatics and computational biology, applied to cancer research and neurodegenerative diseases.
Dr Gendoo’s interdisciplinary background and expertise, in both biology and computer science, provide her with unique perspectives to embark on future research directions that bridge the disciplines of transcriptomics, pharmacogenomics, and structural bioinformatics. Her research program focuses on translational bioinformatics and integrative approaches towards characterization of preclinical disease models (organoids, xenografts, GEMMs) and their application in personalized therapy. One of her research axes focuses on elucidating the molecular pathogenesis of in vitro and in vivo pre-clinical disease models (xenografts, organoids, GEMMs), and developing reliable and quantifiable frameworks for matching model systems to their human counterparts. In tandem, Dr Gendoo will also focus on developing translational and pharmacogenomics approaches that harness these disease models for therapeutics.
Dr Gendoo was awarded several competitive international fellowships that have supported her research directions, including a Marie Curie Fellowship in the UK, and a Brain Canada-CIBC Brain Cancer Research Training Award in Canada. She received multiple travel awards to present her work in international conferences and workshops, including prestigious and competitive speaker invitations from the Keystone Symposia (USA). She was invited to give an oral presentation of her work on drug inference at the Keystone Symposium on “Genomics and Personalized Medicine” in February 2016. Dr Gendoo also presented her work on the comparison of the genomic landscape of pancreatic tumours, xenografts, and organoids at the Keystone Symposium entitled “Engineered Cells and Tissues as Platforms for Discovery and Therapy”, held in Boston, USA in March 2017.
Dr Gendoo has a strong track record of publications, with 20 publications and an H index of 11. She has published in specialized and high-impact journals within bioinformatics, and developed new software packages to enable reproducible research in bioinformatics. Her work is published in leading impact journals in biomedical research (Cancer Research), and bioinformatics (Oxford Bioinformatics, Plos Computational Biology).