Justin Bellavance

Montreal, Canada - justin.bellavance@gmail.com

Data Enthousiast and Professional Learner

Experience

Student Researcher / Data Scientist

Montreal Heart Institute
  • Found millions of novel associations between genetic variants and continuous and binary variables within 500GB+ of human tabular and JSON-based data using Python (Pandas, Polars), Bash and Linux-based tools
  • Developed interactive and flexible figures for 578 associations results using D3 and javascript on a web page
  • Performed quality control by generating and verifying QQ plots, distributions and negative controls and using properly using covariates such as top 10 principal components, age and sex
Summer 2023

Data Science / Bioinformatics Intern

Agriculture and AgriFood Canada
  • Predicted best oat parental lines using published statistical genetic techniques using Python and R
  • Employed gBLUP (genomic best linear unbiased predictions) after cleaning 3000+ oat line genetic data
  • Created publication-ready result visualisations using interactive figures using RShiny web app with plotly
  • Explored Azure Databricks for data processing and dashboard creation for best parental oat lines
Summer 2023

Bioinformatics Technical Development Summer Intern

Canadian Centre for Computational Genomics (C3G)
  • Benchmarked Linux-based data analysis tools, finding a 136% speed improvement over legacy software
  • Simulated genomic data to generate a confusion matrix used in final presentation to team for chosen software
Summer 2022

Web Application Intern

Shared Services Canada
  • Work within MySQL database to optimize Archer application for project risk management team.
  • Use python to optimize quick and accurate translation of text within html elements from English to French
Summer 2021

Project Leader (Volunteer)

Carleton Artificial Intelligence Society
  • Organize, host and judge an online Kaggle machine learning competition for students with distributed cash prizes
  • Connect with sponsors for funding for compeition and other society activities.
April 2020 - April 2022

Education

University of Montreal

Master's of Bioinformatics

Thesis: CLSA-PheWeb - An Interactive Visualization Tool for Large-Scale Sex-Stratified Genetic Associations Analysis of Aging-Related Traits and Diseases in a Canadian Cohort

September 2023 - August 2025

Carleton University

Graduated with High-Distinction
Bachelor's of Neuroscience and Computer Science

Honours Thesis: Computational scRNA-seq Meta-Analysis Uncovers Sex Differences in Expressed Genes within Spinal Cords of Adult Mice

September 2019 - April 2023

Skills

Programming Languages & Tools

Interests

When not sitting in front of VSCode, I love training for my next distance goal, playing volleyball or trying overly complex recipes.

Not to mention, I often find myself in coffee shops sipping on a cortado while writing about Python, Data, Bioinformatics and Life blog page.

McGill PharmaHacks - 2nd Place

Worked with single-cell genetic data in Python and R to collaborate with team to implement deep learning models to predict Covid-19 outcomes

March 2024

McHacks - 48 hour hackathon

Using python to aggregate and clean restaurant data for number of locations, average revenue and physical location to create interactive visualisations using Google Maps API on React web application

February 2024

Academic Achievements

  • CIHR $27,000 master's research achivement award
  • Department of Medicine $100 Best Poster Presentation
  • Grade Scholarships of $17,000+ (University of Montreal and Carleton combined)
February 2024

Resume (PDF)

Articles (coming soon)