Philip Awadalla is the Professor ofMolecular Genetics at theNuffield Department of Population Health, and aBig Data Institute Group Leader at theUniversity of Oxford, as well as the Faculty of Medicine,University of Toronto. He is the National Scientific Director[1][2] of the Canadian Partnership for Tomorrow's Health (CanPath), formerly the Canadian Partnership for Tomorrow Project (CPTP),[3][4] and executive director of the Ontario Health Study.[5] He was the Executive Scientific Director of the Genome Canada Genome Technology Platform, the Canadian Data Integration Centre.[6][7] Professor Awadalla was also the Executive Scientific Director of theCARTaGENE biobank,[8][9][10] a regional cohort member of the CPTP,[3] from 2009 to 2015, and is currently a scientific advisor for this and other scientific and industry platforms. At the OICR, he was the Director of Computational Biology.
In 2004, Awadalla was appointed as assistant professor at the Department of Genetics and Centre forBioinformatics (led byBruce Weir) atNorth Carolina State University. His work there included identifying potential genetic targets for vaccines toPlasmodium falciparum, the main malaria parasite.[11][12] This has included the first genetic maps and mapping of drug resistance genes in malaria.[13][14]
In 2007 Awadalla, he became an associate professor in the department ofpediatrics at theUniversité de Montréal, and in 2009 he became the Executive Scientific Director of the CARTaGENE Biobank ofQuébec. His research focused on developing next-generation genomics platforms to support to pediatric disease research and discovery of rare mutations.[15][16] Awadalla discovered the relationship of a histone methylating factor encoded by the genePRDM9 and child-hood acute lymphoblasticleukemia.[17][16]
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.[18][19] Other discoveries include large scale RNA methylation and its genetic control in human mitochondria[20] and the impact of population size on negative selection in humans.[21][22] 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.[23][24]
Awadalla is part of a number of collaborative programmes, including the analysis and functional analysis groups of the1000 Genomes Project[25] and the Pan Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes Program.[citation needed]
