Career Profile

I am a post-doctoral research at Brown University’s Data Science Institute. I have broad interests in statistics and data science, particularly in the world of genetics and biology. My doctoral research was with Simon Gravel’s lab studying structure in population genetics and how to use dimensionality reduction to understand biobank data and improve inference. I am also interested in using data from single-cell RNA sequencing, neuroinformatics, and biological data.

I enjoy teaching courses and workshops as my schedule permits, focusing on statistics and statistical computing. My work prior to my doctorate included professional work as a methodologist as well as graduate studies in data mining and sports analytics.

Work experience

Teaching assistant and workshop leader

2018 - 2023
McGill University, Montreal

I have assisted in teaching courses in population genetics, and foundational courses in my PhD program. I have also designed and taught workshops on statistics and statistical programming in R as well as dimensionality reduction and ODEs.

Instructor

2018
McGill University, Montreal

I was the instructor for EPIB613: Introduction to Statistical Software for McGill graduate students in epidemiology. The course covered how to implement statistical approaches using R.

Mathematical statistician

2010 - 2017
Statistics Canada, Ottawa

I was responsible for the development and implementation of statistical methods for several surveys and projects. My responsibilities included survey design, sample selection and allocation, weighting, estimation, statistical programming, record linkage, and writing and presenting technical reports to stakeholders as well as supervision duties. My projects included:

  • The International Travel Survey
  • The Canadian Survey of Economic Well-Being
  • The Canadian Income Survey
  • The Longitudinal Immigration Database

Technical consultant

2007 - 2010
The Co-operators, Guelph

I was responsible for developing internal applications for insurance agents and database maintenance for the company. Most of the work was done in Visual Basic, VBA, and SQL.

Online content

Dimension reduction workshop - An interactive introduction to dimension reduction of genetic and single-cell data for the McGill Initiative in Computation Medicine.
Introduction to statistics in R - An introductory workshop for students in biology to learn the theory and application of statistics in R. Covers hypothesis testing, ANOVA, and regression.
Introduction to linear regression workshop - An introductory workshop on theory and applications of linear regression with accompanying code.
Dimension reduction of genotypes - Repository of code used to study dimension reduction on genotype data and to accompany my PLOS Genetics publicaiton.
An interactive demonstration of dimension reduction on genotype data - A jupyter notebook comparing PCA, t-SNE, and UMAP on 1000 Genomes Project data.
Modelling population growth using ordinary differential equations - An introduction to using ODEs to solve models of population dynamics.
Death by Car - A project designed to collect and analyze news stories of traffic violence against cyclists and pedestrians in Canada.

Publications

  • Topological stratification of continuous genetic variation in large biobanks
  • Alex Diaz-Papkovich, Shadi Zabad, Chief Ben-Eghan, Luke Anderson-Trocmé, Georgette Femerling, Vikram Nathan, Jenisha Patel, Simon Gravel
    bioRxiv (2023)
  • A review of UMAP in population genetics
  • Alex Diaz-Papkovich, Luke Anderson-Trocmé, Simon Gravel
    Journal of Human Genetics (2020)
  • UMAP reveals cryptic population structure and phenotype heterogeneity in large genomic cohorts
  • Alex Diaz-Papkovich, Luke Anderson-Trocmé, Chief Ben-Eghan, Simon Gravel
    PLOS Genetics (2019).
  • On the Genes, Genealogies, and Geographies of Quebec
  • Luke Anderson-Trocmé, Dominic Nelson, Shadi Zabad, Alex Diaz-Papkovich, Ivan Kryukov, Nikolas Baya, Mathilde Touvier, Ben Jeffery, Christian Dina, Hélène Vézina, Jerome Kelleher, Simon Gravel
    Science (2023).
  • Conserved whole-brain spatiomolecular gradients shape adult brain functional organization
  • Jacob W Vogel, Aaron Alexander-Bloch, Konrad Wagstyl, Maxwell Bertolero, Ross Markello, Adam Pines, Valerie J Sydnor, Alex Diaz-Papkovich, Justine Hansen, Alan C Evans, Boris Bernhardt, Bratislav Misic, Theodore Satterthwaite, Jakob Seidlitz
    bioRxiv (2022).
  • Recent shifts in the genomic ancestry of Mexican Americans may alter the genetic architecture of biomedical traits
  • Melissa L Spear, Alex Diaz-Papkovich, Elad Ziv, Joseph M Yracheta, Simon Gravel, Dara G Torgerson, Ryan D Hernandez
    eLife (2020).
  • Don’t ignore genetic data from minority populations
  • Chief Ben-Eghan, Rosie Sun, Jose Sergio Hleap, Alex Diaz-Papkovich, Hans Markus Munter, Audrey V. Grant, Charles Dupras, Simon Gravel
    Nature (2020)
  • A molecular gradient along the longitudinal axis of the human hippocampus informs large-scale behavioral systems
  • Jacob Vogel, Renaud La Joie, Michel Grothe, Alexandr Diaz-Papkovich, Andrew Doyle, Etienne Vachon-Presseau, Claude Lepage, Reinder Vos de Wael, Rhalena Thomas, Yasser Iturria-Medina, Boris Bernhardt, Gil Rabinovici, and Alan Evans
    Nature Communications (2020).
  • The Alzheimer's Disease Prediction Of Longitudinal Evolution (TADPOLE) Challenge: Results after 1 Year Follow-up.
  • Razvan V. Marinescu, Neil P. Oxtoby, Alexandra L. Young, Esther E. Bron, Arthur W. Toga, Michael W. Weiner, Frederik Barkhof, Nick C. Fox, Arman Eshaghi, Tina Toni, Marcin Salaterski, Veronika Lunina, Manon Ansart, Stanley Durrleman, Pascal Lu, Samuel Iddi, Dan Li, Wesley K. Thompson, Michael C. Donohue, Aviv Nahon, Yarden Levy, Dan Halbersberg, Mariya Cohen, Huiling Liao, Tengfei Li, Kaixian Yu, Hongtu Zhu, Jose G. Tamez-Pena, Aya Ismail, Timothy Wood, Hector Corrada Bravo, Minh Nguyen, Nanbo Sun, Jiashi Feng, B.T. Thomas Yeo, Gang Chen, Ke Qi, Shiyang Chen, Deqiang Qiu, Ionut Buciuman, Alex Kelner, Raluca Pop, Denisa Rimocea, Mostafa M. Ghazi, Mads Nielsen, Sebastien Ourselin, Lauge Sorensen, Vikram Venkatraghavan, Keli Liu, Christina Rabe, Paul Manser, Steven M. Hill, James Howlett, Zhiyue Huang, Steven Kiddle, Sach Mukherjee, Anais Rouanet, Bernd Taschler, Brian D. M. Tom, Simon R. White, Noel Faux, Suman Sedai, Javier de Velasco Oriol, Edgar E. V. Clemente, Karol Estrada, Leon Aksman, Andre Altmann, Cynthia M. Stonnington, Yalin Wang, Jianfeng Wu, Vivek Devadas, Clementine Fourrier, Lars Lau Raket, Aristeidis Sotiras, Guray Erus, Jimit Doshi, Christos Davatzikos, Jacob Vogel, Andrew Doyle, Angela Tam, Alex Diaz-Papkovich, Emmanuel Jammeh, Igor Koval, Paul Moore, Terry J. Lyons, John Gallacher, Jussi Tohka, Robert Ciszek, Bruno Jedynak, Kruti Pandya, Murat Bilgel, William Engels, Joseph Cole, Polina Golland, Stefan Klein, Daniel C. Alexander
    arXiv (2020).
  • Data Mining the Play-by-Play: Assessing and Applying NHL Performance Metrics Using Statistical Methods
  • Alex Diaz-Papkovich
    Diss. Carleton University, 2015. Supervised by Dr. Shirley Mills.

    Skills & Proficiency

    Statistics

    R

    Data visualization

    Mathematics

    Bioinformatics

    Python

    SAS

    Matlab