Justin Schonfeld, PhD

Dr. Justin Schonfeld is a research scientist with the Innovation and Application Development Section of the Division of Enteric Diseases of the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC). He has worked and published on a multitude of machine learning, computational intelligence, and bioinformatics topics. While at the National Microbiology Laboratory he assisted in developing several software tools for analyzing trends in bacterial whole-genome sequencing data, clustering plasmids, and automatically determining subtyping schemes for bacterial populations. Over the last two years he has participated in PHAC’s COVID-19 response through the development of bioinformatics tools to help with the analysis of wastewater genomic data. 

Prior to working at PHAC Dr. Schonfeld worked as a research associate at the University of Waterloo developing natural language processing tools and software for analyzing vaccine sentiment on Twitter. He led a team developing tools for quality checking, storing, and leveraging the data to use as an early warning signal to predict pathogen outbreaks. Dr. Schonfeld has also led teams in developing tools for optimizing industrial processes, visualizing variability in protein structure, and using natural language processing to read the medical literature and performing drug re-targeting using extracted information. 

Dr. Schonfeld is currently working on developing machine learning and natural language processing tools for applications related to the surveillance and detection of enteric disease outbreaks.