Hi. I’m Mike, and I find it difficult to write ‘About’ sections of websites.
Where to begin?
Professionally, I’m a Director at a global men’s health charity, with a primary focus on implementing research, advocacy, and programming related to prostate cancer in Canada. This includes a fair amount of media work (see the ‘Media’ section for some selected pieces) and working with the incredible people working to end prostate cancer, which kills nearly 6,000 Canadian men every year and will affect 1-in-8 men in their lifetime.
Prior to this, I was a research scientist at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre and the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research here in Toronto (where I was born and now live), and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Urology at the University of Toronto. My long-standing research interests are in prostate cancer genomics, computational biology, and biomarker discovery. I had the great privilege to work on and lead a number of large international research teams, including the Canadian Prostate Cancer Genome Network (CPC-GENE), the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC), and the Pan-Prostate Cancer Group (PPCG). I hold a Bachelor of Science from McGill University, a Ph.D. in Cellular and Molecular Medicine from the University of Ottawa, and I did post-doctoral studies in radiation medicine at the Princess Margaret in Toronto. I have authored or co-authored 159 research papers, reviews, editorials, and book chapters that have, collectively, been cited over 18,000 times, with an h-index of 54. You can find some of these publications in the ‘Papers’ section of this site.
On the personal side, I live in Toronto with my wife and two kids. I’m an accomplished amateur photographer and not-so-accomplished amateur musician. You can find selected photographs and music on the site. I’m also a huge baseball fan, which, coupled with my love of statistics and data, turned me into something of an amateur sabermetrician. I previously coached AA youth baseball but now I just enjoy watching my son play.