Arnaud Droit Research Thrust 2 – Health and Life Sciences

Associate Professor, Faculty of Medicine, Université Laval,
L’Oréal Research and Innovation Chair in Digital Biology

Arnaud Droit is an Associate Professor in the Department of Molecular Medicine in the Faculty of Medicine at Université Laval and a researcher at the CHU de Québec –  Université Laval Research Centre, where he heads the bioinformatics and proteomics platform. He is also a member of the executive directorate of Université Laval’s Big Data Research Centre (CRDM). Arnaud Droit studied biochemistry and bioinformatics at Université Toulouse III – Paul Sabatier, in France, and received a Ph.D. from Université Laval. Dr. Droit’s research program strives to develop new approaches and methods in computational genomics so as to effectively and thoroughly analyze the genomic and proteomic data collected, using next-generation technology. His work lies at the interface of biology and computer science.

Since 2016, he holds the L’Oréal Chair in Research and Innovation in Digital Biology, the first research chair in digital biology, which constitutes a center of excellence for the development and analyses of multi-Omic big data technologies (which include the different fields of biology ending with the suffix “omic”: genomic, epigenomic, proteomic, metagenomic, etc.).

Dr. Droit oversees a number of large-scale projects that address the challenges of managing massive data and extracting actionable knowledge for the life science community. One of his projects aims to aggregate many biological data sources, link them together, discover new relationships, and make them available on the Internet via dynamic visualization interfaces. He is also involved in the development of machine learning tools dedicated to clinical research and multi-Omics data, which can also be extended to other areas. Other projects cover temporal multi-Omic data analysis, which requires the development of new approaches, and the identification of genes interacting together through the creation of co-expression networks.

Dr. Droit has established many international collaborations that allow him to cover a variety of fields in biology research, including oncology, immunology, and skin diseases.