Professor Wong is jointly appointed in the Department of Biological Sciences and the Department of Medicine. He is also an Associate Director of the Beijing Genomics Institute. The unifying theme behind most of his research is the relentless improvement in our ability to acquire molecular biology data at lower costs. His two biggest programs are in plant sequencing and in viral metagenomics. In the first instance, he is leading an international multidisciplinary consortium to collect gene sequence information for 1000 plant species. In the second instance, he is working with medical doctors at the University of Alberta to develop novel methods to identify pathogens in clinical samples. In all instances, enormous quantities of data are collected and computational analysis plays a central role
