ABOUT DR. PAi

Dr. Shraddha Pai knew right in high school that she wanted to combine biology and computer science. But it was while doing her undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Bioinformatics at the University of Waterloo, that she developed an intense interest in how the brain worked:

this three pound organ that is the seat of our memories, our sense of reality, and our very identity.

Wanting to combine lab work and computational approaches, Pai completed her PhD thesis on the neuroscience of short-term memory at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, where she worked with a rat model of cognition.

Dr. Pai now combines basic and translational research into childhood and adult brain cancers. We still don’t understand why different patients have different outcomes with the same cancer, or why they respond differently to medications. A driving goal in the Pai Lab’s research is to achieve “precision medicine” in brain cancer care. The Pai Lab aim to develop new diagnostic tests and medications that are tailored to a patient’s tumour profile, to increase the chance that a treatment will work.

Dr. Pai believes that achieving this goal requires collaboration across disciplines and a “Swiss army knife” of laboratory and computational techniques to rapidly generate and test new ideas. The Pai Lab studies changes at the DNA level in cancers, and builds models to understand how these changes cascade to impact cell, brain, and cancer function.

Dr. Pai is a recipient of the CIHR Fellowship Award, a Brain and Behavior Research Foundation Young Investigator Award, and the Donnelly Centre Research Excellence Award.

Dr. Pai’s affiliations:

Principal Investigator
Ontario Institute for Cancer Research
Toronto

Assistant Professor
Department of Medical Biophysics
University of Toronto

Collaborative Program in Neuroscience
University of Toronto

Selected publications