Meet Dr. Celia Greenwood, biostatistics expert and our IMPACTT Platform 5 Lead on bioinformatics and computational development. Dr. Greenwood develops analytical bioinformatics tools to understand microbiome data. In this interview with IMPACTT, she shares some insights about her career choices, provides advice for biostatisticians, and also shares some of her personal interests and hidden talents.
Where are you from and what brought you to the Lady Davis Institute at McGill?
I’m originally from Victoria, BC, but did my university degrees in Ontario and Québec. I moved from Toronto (SickKids) to Montréal and the Lady Davis Institute where I was offered a Senior Investigator position in 2010.
How has your interest been drawn to the microbiome?
The patterns interest me. How do the elements in the microbiome work together, interact with each other? How do several different elements all play the same role within a set of interactions? Which ones are synergistic and which ones are antagonistic? And how are all these patterns associated with the diseases and traits of the hosts? All these questions give rise to questions about how to analyze the data.
How would you define your main topic of research and why do you cherish this topic in particular?
My research is all organized around statistical methodology improvements in the fields of genetics and genomics. I like patterns and understanding how they arise. I enjoy working with colleagues who bring an in-depth understanding of a particular disease or context and matching this knowledge with appropriate methods of finding associations between genomic data and phenotypes.
What is the latest scientific breakthrough that blew you away and why?
The current ability of polygenic risk scores to predict traits and disease risks really surprised me when these results first started to appear.
What are the main hurdles of being of biostatistician? Do you have any advice to overcome them?
Biostatisticians tend to work at the boundary between the quantitative discipline of statistics/math and an applied field, in my case genetics, with a foot in each camp. The challenge is how to maintain the balance, how to keep up to date reasonably well in both domains. How to communicate with both domains. My advice is to work with excellent colleagues, and I have been privileged to do so.
If we asked people who know you to give us two of your most striking personality traits what would they be?
I had to ask my lab members for key words to describe me a few years ago, and this is what they came up with: Helpful, inclusive, detail-oriented, enthusiastic, collaborative.
Do you have a fun childhood story related to wanting to be a scientist?
No not really, but I did say once to my mother that although I liked math, I couldn’t think of any careers that followed from a math degree. She encouraged me to major in math anyway, and reassured me that I’d find something that interested me. Truly – how many high school students have heard of “statistical genetics”?
Growing up, would you define yourself as a “nerd”?
A bookworm. I read voraciously and quickly.
What is your favourite hidden talent?
I know quite a few telephone numbers off by heart.
