Michelle D. Brazas, Phd Email & Phone Number

Canada

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Toronto

Working directly with the Program Directors, Dr. Brazas also manages the operational and fiscal activities and oversees the administrative coordination for two of AO's participating programs: Genome Informatics and Computational Biology Programs. Together these programs comprise 1/3rd of the OICR workforce encompassing 6 Principal Investigators and ~110 personnel. Her work ensures the outstanding achievements and outputs of these teams are highlighted and reported; she also prudently manages the fiscal budgets across funding sources and timelines. She actively works to cultivate and extend relationships among staff and executives across OICR to enhance work efficiencies and better enable the successful completion of our research goals. Dr. Brazas is also a strong builder of community amongst the Genome Informatics and Computational Biology teams, coordinating and hosting monthly lunches, retreats and other team building initiatives.

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

In this strategic leadership role, Dr. Brazas provides operational and fiscal leadership to OICR's Adaptive Oncology (AO) Initiative comprising 5 Programs, 3 Resources and 3 Research Projects across the province of Ontario. She was integral to facilitating the brainstorming, inception and launch of AO, and has recently guided AO through its 5 year renewal.Reporting into the Head of AO, Dr. Brazas is responsible for overseeing and managing AO's research progress, and developing and running initiatives which enhance AO communications and networking within the cancer community, as well as with patient partners. She also plays an active role in coordinating and authoring external funding applications in support of AO and OICR.

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Toronto, On

As Manager of Research and Knowledge Exchange, Dr. Brazas's portfolio included management of Bioinformatics.ca, as well as the Outreach Education and Knowledge Translation activities for OICR.Bioinformatics.ca is a national initiative to provide post-graduate training opportunities for research scientists and clinicians in bioinformatics. Dr. Brazas played a central role in reshaping the Canadian Bioinformatics Workshops (CBW) offerings into their current intensive, short-course, data analysis focused format. For 8+ years, Michelle led the day-to-day management of Bioinformatics.ca and CBW, including workshop development and facilitation, faculty organization and support, and fiscal oversight. She also maintained the website content and bioinformatics jobs board. To support the fiscal viability of Bioinformatics.ca, Dr. Brazas authored and was awarded funding (>$100K as lead), and sought collaborations and sponsors to provide trainee scholarships. She also maintained an active publication track record focused on bioinformatics training needs and approaches.For OICR, Dr. Brazas established OICR’s education programming, developing a strategic and operational plan which aligned with the institution’s mandate and mission. She launched collaborative educational initiatives focused on cancer research for public and high school audiences, including collaborating with CIHR’s Café Scientifique, Let’s Talk Science, NSERC’s BioTech showcase days, Researcher for a Day events, career mentoring, co-op programming, etc. She also cultivated and built relationships across the organization to enable successful knowledge translation within the organization, including a Lunch and Learn series, departmental retreats, and OICR’s scientific conference. Dr. Brazas regularly reported on her educational activities to OICR Executive, and to the Scientific Advisory Board.

Hamilton, On

Having graduated from the same program, Dr. Brazas was invited to facilitate problem based learning sessions in the 3rd year Pharmacology programme. She provided constructive feedback to students to develop their knowledge base and critical thinking skills.

Vancouver, Bc

Established the 1st applied research lab in the Biotechnology programme at BCIT. Dr. Brazas was awarded CFI funding to establish the Integrated Molecular Biology Laboratory (IMBL, $500K). To build a research portfolio for IMBL, Dr. Brazas collaborated with internal and external researchers to establish a research program aligned with BCIT’s applied research mandate. Over this time, she gained familiarity with research contracts, teaching constraints and funding opportunities for the college system.Her role at BCIT also including a teaching component where she developed and delivered teaching materials for the Introduction to Biotechnology course. She also developed and taught bioinformatics content within other departmental courses.

Tsukuba, Japan

As one of the 1st foreign research assistants at Banyu, Ms. Brazas contributed to the testing of muscarinic compounds for activity on the M4 receptor using various pain models.

Montreal, Qc

Co-op research position focused on evaluating agents of the uterine musculature.

Laval, Qc

Co-op research position evaluating the ADME properties of HSV-2 agents.

Phd, Microbiology

Activities and Societies: Student Biotechnology Network Faculty of Graduate Studies CouncilDoctorate in Microbiology Thesis: Mechanisms.

Hon. B.Sc, Pharmacology

Honors Bachelor Degree in Biology-Pharmacology