Paul Pavlidis

Professor Paul Pavlidis is a faculty member at the University of British Columbia (UBC) Faculty of Medicine, affiliated with the Department of Psychiatry, Michael Smith Laboratories, and Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health. He serves as Associate Director of the UBC Graduate Program in Bioinformatics and leads the Pavlidis Lab at UBC.

• Education
  • Ph.D. (1994) from University of California, Berkeley
  • B.A. (1989) from Cornell University

His research focuses on neuroinformatics, integrating genomics, bioinformatics, and systems biology to study gene networks in psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders like schizophrenia, autism, Alzheimer’s, and depression. He develops open-access tools including Gemma (transcriptome data harmonization), GOTrack, and ErmineJ.

The lab applies single-cell genomics, bulk RNA-seq, and epigenetic analysis to understand cellular composition changes in brain disorders. Recent work includes a 2020 study in Biological Psychiatry identifying astrocyte and neuron population shifts in schizophrenia.

Scientific Awards & Grants

• Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) John R. Evans Leaders Fund grant (2016)
• National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant ($1.6 million USD, 2016-2021) for “Neuroinformatics for gene expression: networks, function and meta-analysis”

Pavlidis advocates for open science, emphasizing reusable data and tools. His lab harmonizes over 19,000 transcriptomic datasets, enabling large-scale meta-analyses. Future work includes integrating single-cell RNA-sequencing into Gemma and advancing AI-driven bioinformatics.