Research Associate
School of Nutrition Sciences, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Ottawa
Dr. Mottawea was awarded his Ph.D. in Microbiology and Immunology from University of Ottawa in March 2015. During his PhD research project, he has experienced different high throughput microbiota metagenomic analyses techniques such as 454-pyrosequencing, Illumina HiSeq, 16S rRNA-based microarray and mass spectrometry from clinical sample preparation to library constructions and finally raw data analyses. Also, he has experience working with many bioinformatic tools, Linux environment, R, XLstat and GraphPad Prism. He experienced some mouse models of inflammation such as DSS, germ free and gnotobiotic mouse models. He experienced isolating some anaerobic bacteria from clinical samples and testing their potential to induce inflammation.Afterwards, He joined the team of Dr. Lawrence Goodridge, Ian and Jayne Munor Chair in food safety and the director of Food Safety and Quality Program at McGill University, as a Postdoctoral Fellow conducting research on developing a Syst-OMICS approach to ensuring food safety and reducing the economic burden of salmonellosis. He experienced many bioinformatic tools such as assembly of long PacBio reads using celera/HGAP and familiar with Falcon assembler, de-novo and reference based microbial genome assembly using SPAdes and CLCgenomics, genome polishing and optical mapping; bacterial genome annotation using PROKKA and RAST, prophage detection using Prophinder, Phaster and PhiSpy and genomic islands detection using Island Viewer. He finished his third postdoctoral training via an award from School of Nutrition Sciences, University of Ottawa where he helped establish a gut microbiome research platform (NuGUT). With more than 10 years of microbiome research experience and more than 5 years of postdoctoral training, Dr. Mottawea has experienced Systems Biology, Metagenomics, Metabolomics, Microbiome characterization and targeting, Syst-OMICs approaches, Molecular Microbiology, Bioinformatics, Food Microbiology and Nutrition Sciences. He has publications in “Nature Communication”, " Frontiers in Microbiology", "Genome Announcement", "Pediatric Research", "J Nutrition", “Gut”, “Diabetes”, “FASEBJ” and “Water Research”. He reviewed many published articles in Microbiome, Frontiers in Immunology, Frontiers in Microbiology, Nutrients, Microorganisms, and Water. Currently, he is a review editor in Frontiers in Microbiology and a topic editor in Biology/MDPI. He has an accepted patent to be tested in the USA in 2015.