The Team

Dr. David Müller, M.D. Ph.D.

David graduated from medical school in Bonn, Germany in 2010. As part of his M.D. thesis, he first encountered biomarker-driven research using liquid biopsies. After splitting time between residency in urology and his Ph.D. studies on pathomechanisms of disease progression in urological malignancies, David obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Basel, Switzerland in 2021, and his board certification in urology through the Swiss Society of Urology in 2022; the same year he joined the Wyatt Lab. His research focuses on the clonal evolution of urothelial cancer under the selective pressure of anti-cancer therapy and is driven to improve clinical decision-making by implementing new biomarkers and advancing our understanding of the biological processes behind therapy resistance.

Dr. Jack Bacon, Ph.D.

Jack holds a BSc. with distinction in biology from the University of British Columbia. Having completed a summer studentship at the Vancouver Prostate Centre in 2015, Jack decided to return for his MSc. in Genome Science and Technology in 2017. In 2019, he transferred into the Ph.D. program. Jack’s research involves interrogation of circulating tumour DNA and clonal hematopoiesis in patients with metastatic kidney cancer, via a collaboration with Drs. Nappi and Kollmannsberger at BC Cancer. He is also working with collaborators at the University Hospital in Basel, Switzerland on a non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer sequencing project. Jack holds a UBC 4-Year Doctoral Fellowship and has won various travel awards from CIHR and the UBC Genome Sciences and Technology program.

Asli Munzur

Asli finished her B.Sc. in biology at the University of British Columbia and started her graduate studies in genome sciences at the Wyatt Lab. She is interested in various aspects of prostate cancer, including using various bioinformatics methods to characterize the genomic changes during tumour progression. Asli is partially funded by the BC Cancer Rising Stars Award, worth $70,000 over 2 years.

Wilson Tu

Wilson is a Master’s student in the Computer Science program at the University of British Columbia and is currently co-supervised by Dr. Jiarui Ding. Wilson mainly focuses on Computational Biology, particularly in applying probabilistic models in sequencing data. He is currently working on the spinal metastasis project to study the cancer microenvironment.

Yi Jou (Ruby) Liao

Ruby earned her B.Sc. in Computational and Systems Biology at UCLA. She became a M.Sc. student at the Wyatt Lab in 2023, following a rotation as part of the UBC Genome Science and Technology Research Rotation Award. Ruby is broadly interested in leveraging computational methods to characterize and exploit potential vulnerabilities in prostate cancer.

Joonatan Sipola

Joonatan obtained his BSc in Biotechnology and MSc in Bioinformatics at Tampere University, and is pursuing his PhD in tight collaboration with Dr. Wyatt. He has focused on methodological development in his projects covering multiple topics, including subclonal reconstruction and cfChIP-seq analysis. He’s currently working on utilizing cfDNA fragmentomics to infer cancer epigenetics and transcriptomics.

Sarah Ng

Sarah graduated with her BSc. in Combined Honours Microbiology & Immunology and Computer Science at the University of British Columbia in 2022. She carried out a 16-month co-op term with the Wyatt Lab during her undergraduate degree inferring gene expression from nucleosome positioning in prostate cancer ctDNA, and is now continuing her research as a bioinformatician. She is currently working on correlating genomic alterations with clinical outcomes for various treatments of advanced prostate cancer, leveraging serial ctDNA samples from clinical trials around the world.

Cecily Bernales

Cecily is a laboratory research assistant who is mainly responsible for library construction and targeted sequencing of liquid and tissue biopsy samples from metastatic prostate cancer patients accrued to our province-wide collection program.

Chris Tam

Chris is a senior student at Simon Fraser University studying molecular biology and biochemistry. He is responsible for blood processing and DNA extractions of liquid and tissue biopsy samples from prostate, bladder, testicular and kidney cancer patients accrued to our province-wide collection program.