Rob Young

I am a postdoctoral researcher and project manager in the Hanner lab and I am involved in numerous projects funded by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency in cooperation with the animal health, plant health, and operations branches. We work with different government and academic protocols to investigate biological targets of regulatory interest toward food protection and sustainability. One challenge of this work is to connect government research and protocols with Canadian interests through efforts to better access and share agricultural research data with industry, academic, and government representatives.

Our work will ultimately contribute to better tracking of animal and plant diseases and disease vectors. We have had numerous successes generating data sets, including DNA barcodes to further populate libraries, metabarcoding data from insect biosurveillance traps, metagenomics investigating plant pathogens, and qPCR data looking at targeted organisms. We have used these data to answer project-specific questions and to address the challenges related to data access. We also use these data to establish consistent formats and centralized storage through protocol development to provide a framework to increase data access and sharing.