Western researcher turns to big data in hunt for HIV cure 

Scanning electromicrograph of an HIV-infected T cell. (U.S.National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Wikimedia Commons) - Roux-Cil Ferreira's quest can best be described as searching for a needle in a field full of haystacks. She is searching for a virus whose trademark is to hide itself in cells indefinitely and re-emerge only when most people assume it has vanished. Ferreira is one of fewer than a dozen experts in the world examining this key problem in solving HIV: how the virus can disappear to the vanishing point in a tiny sampling of the body's immune system cells, only to reappear and replicate out of control even years later. Unlike almost all of that elite group of her peers, Ferreira is tackling the problem with bioinformatics, a field that uses big-data analyses to get to the root of conundrums as complicated as HIV/AIDS. Rather than viewing an HIV cure through a strictly medical lens, Ferreira is tackling the problem with advanced mathematical analyses. Ferreira is the newly announced recipient of one of three prestigious Ontario Genomics-CANSSI Ontario Postdoctoral Fellowships in Genome Data Science.