Ioannis Ragoussis

Professor Ioannis (Jiannis) Ragoussis has studied Biochemistry at the University of Tuebingen, Germany, where he obtained his PhD. He did his postdoctoral studies as EMBO fellow with J. Trowsdale at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund Laboratories in London, UK. Subsequently he became Lectures and then Senior Lecturer at the Division of Medical and Molecular Genetics at Guy’s Hospital, then Guy’s and now King’s Medical School. In 2001 he moved to the University of Oxford as Head of Genomics and in 2013 to McGill University where he is Head of Genome Sciences at the McGill University Genome Center and Professor in Human Genetics at the Department of Human Genetics. He is also affiliated with the Department of Bioengineering and Visiting Professor at the University of Thessaly, Greece. He has developed expertise in all fields of genomics and functional genomics. His main interest is developing state-of-the art NGS based approaches to disease gene identification, as well as functional genomics approaches for the identification of prognostic markers and associated pathways in gynecological cancers and brain cancer.

As head of Genome Sciences, he is responsible for the Genomic Platform Development within the McGill Genome Centre. He has established the Center’s high-though put nucleic extraction facility, genotyping facility, long read sequencing technology and single cell genomics.  He has responsibility for the scientific oversight of the MAGIC production platform, new technology evaluation and integration. As chair of the McGill Genome Center’s Technology Development and Head of the Advanced Genomic Technologies Laboratory, which includes the Single Cell Genomics Lab of the McGill Genome Center, he works on technical developments related to single cell genomics as well as long read sequencing technologies. In 2019 he introduced a PromethION instrument at the Center and works on applications of this technology in population studies and transcriptomics. Supported by CFI the lab includes a Fluidigm BioMark HD instrument, a 10X Genomics Chromium instrument, Nanopore Sequencers (MinION and PromethION), a PacBio Sequel instrument, as well as low volume liquid handling instruments.

The Ragoussis lab is a member of McGill’s Integrative and Quantitative Biology Initiative, lead by Prof. Jacalyn Vogel at the Department of Biology. The lab is responsible for single molecule sequencing using PacBio Sequel technology.

The laboratory is developing genomic tools as part of the international effort to develop Sterile Insert Techniques (SIT) in collaboration with The International Atomic Energy Authority. As part of this work it has contributed to the groundbreaking discovery of the maleness on the Y (MoY) factor in tephretidae published in Science: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2019/08/28/science.aax1318

The laboratory plays a key role in SRAS-COV-2 genome sequencing as part of the Canadian effort on Host and Virus genome sequencing, CanCOGEn, funded by Genome Canada, where Ragoussis chairs the virus genome sequencing committee.