Grant: Doctoral: Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarships

Tuberculosis (TB) is a significant public health concern world-wide, responsible for 1.3 million deaths in 2012 alone. Given that new therapeutics are few and far between for TB, the battle against this re-emerging disease is likely to be won on the data front. Those regions capable of harnessing laboratory, genomic and clinical data describing their TB cases will be the best equipped to apply interventions that prevent outbreaks. British Columbia (BC) has amongst the highest rates of TB incidence within Canada. Canadian-born individuals account for one-third of all TB cases, with the majority of these in homeless individuals or aboriginal communities. The remaining two-thirds of TB occurs amongst immigrants to BC arriving from high-incidence countries. To improve TB prevention and control, researchers at the BC Centre for Disease Control have designed two parallel translational studies, whose results will feed directly into public health policy. The first will characterize TB transmission within BC using the genomic, clinical and population data from TB cases over a 15-year period; the second will analyse ~1 million records of immigrants to BC with asymptomatic TB and identify risk factors for developing symptomatic TB. These two studies will generate millions of data points. Methods for analyzing such large scale genomic and population datasets, however, do not exist or are untested in the public health context. Furthermore, to translate research findings into policy, data must be communicated to teams of specialists with diverse backgrounds. To aid these TB studies, I will develop data analysis methods, tools and visualizations for large-scale epidemiological analysis. The methods will combine the techniques of "big data analysis" with domain-specific genomic and epidemiological tools. Finally, to communicate research findings effectively, I will design visualization tools to promote faster and easier translation of results to knowledge users and stakeholders.