Naveed Aziz  joines SickKids as the Chief Administrative and Scientific Officer

Naveed Aziz  joins SickKids as the Chief Administrative and Scientific Officer for Canada’s Genomics Enterprise (CGEn).

Naveed comes from Genome Canada, where he has been serving as its Director of Technology programs since 2011. In this role, he led Genome Canada’s portfolio of technology programs, with the primary goal of helping to create opportunities to promote innovation and develop new capacity in genomics, big data and related sciences. He completed his Ph.D. in Gene Targeting at the University of Dundee, Scotland, and an executive MBA at the Bradford School of Management, England. His previous roles include serving as the Head of Genomics at University of York, UK, and as a Research Fellow at the S.R. Noble Foundation in Oklahoma, USA.

Naveed has a keen interest in the role of genomic-based technologies in providing solutions to pressing global challenges. His experience of working within the field of Genomics over the past 15 years has led him to strongly believe in the notion of convergence – especially when it originates from divergent fields.

CGEn Receives $32M in funding from CFI.

To support a new era of Canadian genome research, in 2014 Canada’s Foundation for Innovation (CFI) and its partners invested $58M in Canada’s Genomics Enterprise (CGEn), building an unprecedented sequencing and informatics capacity to decode genomes. CGEn linked three nationally funded centres in Toronto (The Centre for Applied Genomics), Montreal (McGill University and Genome Quebec Innovation Centre) and Vancouver (Canada’s Michael Smith Genome Science Centre). Furthermore, in 2017, an additional $32M were invested in CGEn through the CFI Major Science Initiative. CGEn, for the first time, built a coordinated framework for open access and collaborative genome sequencing across Canada.

https://www.innovation.ca/awards/major-science-initiatives-fund