President-Elect
Ryan Brinkman is a leader in bioinformatics and data standardization for flow cytometry, working at the intersection of computation, standards, and biology. His research develops and applies flow cytometry bioinformatics approaches to advance understanding of human health and disease through the analysis of big data, with the goal of letting the community share, compare, and reproduce its results. He led foundational work creating free, open-source computational infrastructure for high-throughput analysis, including core programming functionality in R, MIFlowCyt, FlowRepository, and recent versions of the FCS standard. He founded and led Cytapex Bioinformatics Inc. through its acquisition, applying these tools to both basic research and clinical investigations.
Dr. Brinkman has been deeply involved in ISAC, attending every meeting since 2004 and serving as a Scholar, Council member, Data Standards Task Force Chair, workshop co-organizer, and Associate Editor for Cytometry Part A. He received ISAC’s Distinguished Service Award in 2018.
He is currently Professor (Emeritus) at the University of British Columbia and VP & Research Director, Flow Cytometry at Dotmatics. His recent work includes the Project Discovery partnership with the video game EVE Online, where thousands of citizen scientists contributed to the development of machine-learning-based automated gating algorithms. Anticipating the field’s shift toward AI, Dr. Brinkman founded the SOULCAP initiative, which aims to establish the globally accepted standard for annotating immune cell populations through cytometry.