Rate My Professor Wyeth Wasserman

Wyeth Wasserman, PhD, is Professor in the Department of Medical Genetics in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of British Columbia. He serves as Vice Dean, Research for the Faculty of Medicine, a position he assumed on June 1, 2025. Wasserman is also Senior Scientist at the Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics and Investigator at BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute. Previously, he held roles as Associate Dean, Research and Executive Director of the Child & Family Research Institute, as well as Director of the Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics. He holds a BSc and PhD and has contributed to the establishment of UBC’s School of Biomedical Engineering.

Wasserman’s research centers on computational biology and bioinformatics, with a focus on cis-regulatory elements regulating gene expression, particularly in tissue development and rare pediatric disorders. His laboratory develops databases, health informatics tools, and AI-based methods, including deep learning approaches, to identify functional genetic variations and improve diagnosis of genetic diseases. He co-leads the Silent Genomes Project, promoting equitable genomic technologies for Indigenous children in British Columbia, and participates in the CanEuCre/Pleiades Promoter Project to engineer tissue-specific regulatory sequences. Wasserman has authored over 200 publications and co-invented 16 patents. Notable publications include “Deep Feature Selection: Theory and Application to Identify Enhancers and Promoters” (2016), “Knowledge base and mini-expert platform for the diagnosis of inborn errors of metabolism” (2018), “DNA Shape Features Improve Transcription Factor Binding Site Predictions In Vivo” (2016), and “PAX6 MiniPromoters drive restricted expression from rAAV in the adult mouse retina” (2016). His influence extends through widely adopted software and databases for transcription factor analysis and genome interpretation, fostering collaborations at the intersection of computation and clinical genetics. Awards include election as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2020 for contributions to computational biology and genetics, Killam laureate status, and the UBC Killam Teaching Prize in 2013.