Dr. Michael Wainberg

Dr. Michael Wainberg is an Investigator at the Prosserman Centre for Population Health Research at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute.  He is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and an Associate Member of the Institute of Medical Science at the University of Toronto.

The Wainberg lab applies statistics, machine learning and other computational approaches to large biomedical datasets to learn how genetics causes brain diseases, with the overarching goal of finding new drug targets for these diseases.

The lab has three main areas of focus. First, the team is expanding the landscape of genetic variants associated with brain diseases, by leveraging population-scale biobanks like the UK Biobank, All of Us and FinnGen, alongside disease-specific cohorts like the Alzheimer’s Disease Sequencing Project. The focus here is on understudied classes of variants like rare variants, structural variants, and repeats, as well as understudied diseases like fibromyalgia and other “functional disorders”. Second, the team is developing statistical and machine learning models to infer causal variants, genes, and cell types for brain diseases, leveraging how variants relate to genes and cell types (single-cell omics) and how genes relate to each other (biological networks). Third, the program harnesses single-cell omics to find molecular signatures of brain diseases and cross-references these signatures with those of gene perturbations in brain disease models (from single-cell CRISPR screens) to find candidate drug targets.

Dr. Wainberg was previously a Banting postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health’s Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics in Toronto. He received a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University and Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the University of Toronto.