Damion Dooley

Damion Dooley is an Ontology Development Lead at the Centre for Infectious Disease and One Health, a 20+ member group of bioinformatics and ontology researchers at the Faculty of Health Sciences, Simon Fraser University, Canada. His ontology work began in 2013 to support rapid enteric pathogen whole genome sequencing and analysis. Damion led the creation of the FoodOn food ontology and the Joint Food Ontology Workgroup to facilitate foodborne disease, agriculture, nutrition and food science data sharing. FoodOn, adopting the many food description facets of LanguaL, a popular food composition thesaurus, is now being used and supported by a wide variety of research and inter-agency data sharing projects. He also participates in The Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies Foundry operations committee, and in curation of the Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI). He looks forward to a future of FAIR, harmonized data that reduces barriers to discovery and insight in a rapidly changing world.