Associate Professor

Ph.D., 2010, University of Waterloo

Dr. Boucher is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering at the University of Florida. She has over 85 publications in bioinformatics, with over two dozen of them in succinct data structures and/or alignment. Considering this, she was a keynote speaker for IABD 2019, FAB 2018, RECOMB-SEQ 2016 and the ECCB 2016 Workshop on Pan-Genomics.  She is a recipient of a ESA 2016 Best Paper Award. She overseas the development and maintenance of a number of software methods, including MEGARes and AMRPlusPlus, METAMarc, Kohdista, Vari, VariMerge — and most recently, Moni. In addition, she has built a team of collaborators in various biomedical sciences including microbiology, veterinarian medicine, epidemiology, public health and clinical sciences.

In addition, she actively works on increasing the diversity in bioinformatics education. Her efforts include: being a member of the University of Florida’s Implicit Bias committee, being a panellist for the NSF-funded ACM BCB 2015 Women in Bioinformatics meeting, serving as a faculty advisor for an ACM-W chapter, and being an active member of the Diversity Committee for over three years. She also received a fellowship from The Institute for Learning and Teaching (TILT) for her course redevelopment and served on the advisory committee for an NSF Research Traineeships Program.

She has been the PC chair for a number of conferences, including SPIRE 2020, RECOMB-SEQ 2019, and ACM-BCB 2018.  Most recently, she was nominated to serve on the NIH BDMA Study Section as a Standing Member, and a Board Member of SIG BIO.

Christina Boucher started her career as a doctorate candidate at the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, where she graduated in 2010.  During her PhD she was a recipient of a National Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) doctoral award, the Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship, and the David R. Cheriton Graduate Scholarship.  In 2011, she received a NSERC Post-doctorate Fellowship, which she held at the University of San Diego under the advisement of Pavel Pevzner.