For Dr. Arek Kasprzyk, the new year will mark a welcome return to the field of cancer research.

Kasprzyk joins the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR)’s Informatics and Biocomputing platform in January as Director of Bioinformatics Operations. However, he hasn’t always been involved in the informatics and biocomputing side of cancer research: he completed his MD at the Lublin Medical School in Poland in 1991 and a PhD in Medicine at the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine in London, UK in 1997, both of which offered plenty of time in the lab.

It was only after obtaining these degrees that Kasprzyk decided he wanted to work on the informatics side, piecing together the information that lab researchers produce. He completed an M.Sc. in Molecular Modeling and Bioinformatics at the University of London in 1999. 

“It appealed to me a lot because I like big system management issues,” he says of his decision to work with computers. “I get a big thrill when these big IT systems allow data to be read more easily. I like bringing data to researchers and solving those problems.”

Kasprzyk comes to OICR from the Ensembl and BioMart Projects and the European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge, UK, where he has been working since 2004. At OICR, he will work one week per month before starting full-time in May, 2008. He will be primarily involved in data management issues.

“The value of information increases if you can put it into context of third party data. OICR will generate a lot of important data where, in order to be accurately interpreted, it will need to be connected to external data sources,” Kasprzyk explains. “My job is to transform this raw data into meaningful information.”

Kasprzyk says he is looking forward to joining OICR and to his return to cancer research. “OICR reminds me a lot of my old times,” Kasprzyk says. “Walking in here I feel very much at home having all these labs around.”