University of Guelph Advisory Board

Dr. Gillis’s studies marine biology and is interested in the  biochemical and physiological adaptations that allow animals to live under extreme environments. He completed an MSc with Dr. Jim Ballantyne looking at temperature adaptation in gill mitochondrial membranes from Arctic and temperate marine bivalves.

Sarah Adamowicz’s work involves combining DNA sequence data, organismal traits, information from fossil records, and comparative analytical methods. Additionally, Sarah contributes to the Barcode of Life campaign and develops approaches for using vast DNA sequence resources for broad exploratory and hypothesis-driven biodiversity science.

An overarching theme of Dr. Ali’s  research is studying complex systems in high dimensional settings, but the specific projects are quite diverse. Her approach to all of these problems is by  first considering the associated data generating mechanism and relating it to a graphical Markov model.

Dr. McIlwraith works with Indigenous peoples in British Columbia, Canada, to document territoriality, food and resource harvesting practices, and to identify the Indigenous rights to land. These days, this usually means an effort to understand contemporary Indigenous land use in the context of mining and logging.

David Whittle is an Information Technology leader with over 30 years of domestic and international experience across a variety of industry verticals in the design, delivery, and operation of IT solutions and services. Whittle presently leads the IT organization at the University of Guelph where he is responsibility for defining the strategic direction and execution of IT strategies and IT Governance.