Gerd Bizi

Gerd Bizi

(he/him)

ML for Biology

Hi there!

I’m a Master’s student in the Department of Medical Biophysics at the University of Toronto where I am currently completing rotations. I completed my undergraduate degree at U of T, where I studied Computer Science (with a Focus in AI) and Biochemistry. I’ve taken advanced coursework in deep learning, computer vision, statistical learning, structural biology, bioinformatics, computational biology, and more.

This past summer, I was an RA at the Sunnybrook Research Institute and I worked on two projects. The first was developing a multi-omic model for predicting breast cancer subtypes and the second is predicting recurrence of bladder cancer using WSIs. I was grateful to be supervised by Dr. Martin Yaffe and Dr. Alison Cheung at the Biomarker Imaging Research Laboratory and Dr. Anne Martel.

A large research interest of mine during my undergraduate degree was the cryo-em problem. My senior thesis aimed to develop methodology to reconstruct membrane proteins embedded in their native lipid bilayer by using prior knowledge about their relative orientation. I was co-supervised by Dr. John L. Rubinstein at SickKids and Dr. David J. Fleet at Vector Institute.

I was trained as a wet-lab scientist with experience in confocal fluorescence microscopy, tissue culture, and protein purification under Dr. Peter K. Kim at SickKids, where I completed a summer project and junior thesis on mitochondrial and peroxisomal protein translocation and mitochondrial fission.

Figure 1: Resection of bladder cancer, with patches coloured according to risk of recurrence.
Reconstruction of (synthetic) V-ATPase found in a synaptic vesicle using the algorithm I developed.
Figure 2: Reconstruction of (synthetic) V-ATPase found in a synaptic vesicle using the algorithm I developed.
HeLa cell stained for Phalloidin (red) and BORG3 (green)
Figure 3: HeLa cell stained for Phalloidin (red) and BORG3 (green) imaged using confocal fluorescence microscopy.

I’m more broadly interested in computational imaging, bioinformatics, and computational neuroscience, among other fields.

My hobbies include reading, playing basketball, trying coffee shops around Toronto, and playing the official format of the Pokémon videogame, VGC.