» Research Highlights

What Killed the Job Script? User Support is on the Case

This intrepid team of high-performance computing analysts has healed many a researcher’s headache.
1 November 2022

“A lot of the time, the problems we’re dealing with are almost like a detective story,” says Daniel Stubbs, frontline support coordinator at Calcul Québec. Graduate students vying for a degree might not see the romance, however. Their research, involving huge amounts of data and complex calculations, might take months for a laptop to...

Finding prenatal brain cells trapped in time

Necessity fuels Dr. Nada Jabado’s research. Her lab decodes the genetic signature of brain tumors in children to young adults to find out why they occur and how to treat them.
19 April 2022

Dr. Jabado doesn’t beat around the bush. “I treat patients who have these tumors,” she says. “And they are often lethal.” To defeat an enemy that appears seemingly out of nowhere in young healthy bodies, Dr. Jabado and her lab at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Center must learn everything they can...

COVID-19: Opening Up the Data

As a high performance computation specialist, Quirion essentially programs really big computers. He connects the super-computational capabilities of Calcul Québec and the Compute Canada Federation, the viral samples coming from test clinics and genomic labs, and the phylogenetic scientists who make coronavirus family trees.
13 November 2020

Pierre-Olivier Quirion is the switchboard operator at the centre of a consortium working to track COVID-19 strains in Quebec. This Rube-Golberg-like operation starts when a sample is swabbed from inside your nose and ends when the government releases its latest recommendations. Quirion was also instrumental in making the data accessible to the general public as...

Jamming the Lock to Close the Door on COVID-19

Professor Nicolas Moitessier describes his task as “finding a key that fits the lock,” except he wants to block the keyhole. His McGill chemistry lab is now a vital cog in the wheel in the global effort to develop a drug against the novel coronavirus known as SARS-COV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19.
24 September 2020

Professor Nicolas Moitessier describes his task as “finding a key that fits the lock,” except he wants to block the keyhole. His McGill chemistry lab is now a vital cog in the wheel in the global effort to develop a drug against the novel coronavirus known as SARS-COV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19. Moitessier is...

Dissecting Genetic Variability in the COVID-19 Virus

Julie Hussin wasn’t thinking about taking on COVID-19 when she started looking at the data coming out of affected countries back in January. But this assistant professor of bioinformatics at the University of Montreal and Montreal Heart Institute couldn’t resist feeding her computers the data coming out on the virus’s genome as it crept its way across the globe.
21 July 2020

Hussin’s group uses advanced research computing to answer biological questions. These days, they are looking for mutations in SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the disease called COVID-19. “We took all the sequences showing up every week and looked at how they mutated from one generation to the next and from one country to another,” says...

Resources for researchers and clinicians fighting COVID-19 in Canada

In conversation with Dr.Guillaume Bourque
20 April 2020

Can you tell us more about the COVID-19 Resources platform and how it came about? I was contacted by a colleague asking whether I could help them build an online tool to find and share reagents needed for COVID-19 research projects. Before building it, I decided to ask on Twitter if anybody was already working...

Creating a data base of musical scores

Ichiro Fujinaga
Chair of the Music Technology Area of the Schulich School of Music at McGill University
9 July 2018

Ichiro Fujinaga likens his life’s work and goal to something he nicknames “Google Scores.”. Like Google Books, his project aims to establish a huge database of musical scores that will be freely accessible to anyone who uses the search engine. “What I’ve been working on for the last 30 years is optical music recognition,” says...

Silence, we’re flying!

9 July 2018

Reducing noise: a public health issue When Professor Stéphane Moreau takes a plane, he’s not like the other passengers. On board, he becomes alert to all of the noises around him. It’s a natural reflex for the University of Sherbrooke Research Chair in Aeroacoustics who has chosen to make the noise produced by these flying...

The Search for New Catalysts: at the Heart of Green Chemistry

Marc-André Légaré
Département de chimie, Faculté des sciences et de génie, Université Laval
1 October 2015

Marc-André Légaré, who is finishing a Ph.D in chemistry at Université Laval, was one of the recipients of the Fonds de recherche du Québec’s Étudiants-chercheurs étoiles awards in October 2015. He received the award for an article published in the prestigious American publication Science regarding his research on metal-less catalysts. Complex molecular modelling computations are...

Brain Mapping

Maxime Descoteaux
Département d'informatique, Faculté des sciences, université Sherbrooke
1 March 2013

With Maxime Descoteaux, white matter takes on the colors of the rainbow and the brain becomes a sophisticated tangle of nerve fibers. He is the image wizard who reads in the diffusion of water to reveal the paths of our intellect, the mathematician who puts the pedal to the floor on the brain’s highways. Why...