Jérôme Waldispühl

Jérôme Waldispühl, PhD, is an associate professor of Computer science at McGill University, where he conducts research in RNA bioinformatics and cheminformatics. He develops combinatorial algorithms and machine learning framework to predict RNA 3D structures and their binding with small molecules. Biomedical research increasingly relies on massive datasets, yet many analysis tasks still require manual curation—a process that is time-consuming and unsustainable at scale. As Canada Research Chair in Biomedical Citizen Science, Dr. Waldispühl is exploring how digital communities can fill this gap by harnessing the power of citizen science and the video game industry. He and his research team are collaborating with game developers to create platforms that engage players in analyzing complex biomedical data, particularly in the fields of antimicrobial resistance and cancer. He contributed to pioneer the use of video games including Phylo (2010), Colony B (2016), Borderlands Science and Project Discovery Phase 3 (2020), which have gathered millions of citizen scientists worldwide.

He holds a PhD degree in Computer science from École Polytechnique (France). Before joining McGill University in 2009, he was an instructor in Applied Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2006 to 2009 and did a postdoctoral training in the Department of Biology at Boston College from 2005 to 2006. He received a Tomlinson Science Award in 2012 and the Fessenden Professorship in Science Innovation Award in 2013.

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