Julie Hussin

Biography

Julie Hussin is an associate professor in the Faculty of Medicine at Université de Montréal (UdeM) and a researcher at the Montréal Heart Institute. She is a Junior 2 Research Scholar funded by the Fonds de Recherche du Québec en Santé (FRQS) and chair of the graduate program in bioinformatics at UdeM.

Trained in statistical and evolutionary genomics, Hussin has significant experience in handling multi-omics datasets from large population cohorts. Her work in computational biology is relevant to medical and population genomics, fields in which she has contributed to several methodological advances. Her interdisciplinary work, which aims to develop innovative tools for precision medicine, focuses on improving risk prediction and the management of cardiometabolic disease, particularly heart failure.

Her approaches integrate various data types, such as clinical, genetic, transcriptomic, proteomic and metabolomic data, to uncover new insights into the biological determinants of heart disease, notably through unsupervised learning techniques. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, Hussin’s group also led the development of data science algorithms to analyze viral genetic data, aid viral surveillance efforts, and study host-pathogen interactions and viral evolution.

Her work also focuses on the interpretability, generalizability and fairness of machine learning algorithms in health research. Hussin is dedicated to promoting fair, safe and transparent AI in health research, striving for inclusivity and representation to ensure her work benefits all segments of the population. Her expertise also extends to the field of fair, safe and transparent AI for health research. She teaches several undergraduate and graduate courses in computational biology and population genetics, as well as machine learning for genomics. Prior to joining UdeM as a professor, she was a Human Frontier Postdoctoral Fellow at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics at the University of Oxford (Linacre College), and a visiting fellow at McGill University.