Austin Hammond embraces teamwork and technology at GIFS to accelerate research

Austin Hammond brings diverse research experience to the Global Institute for Food Security (GIFS) at the University of Saskatchewan (USask) — and he’s putting it all to use as the Platform Lead for GIFS’ Omics and Precision Analytics Laboratory (OPAL).

In his role, Hammond oversees one of the largest high-throughput sequencing facilities in Canada — a world-class laboratory that provides genomics, transcriptomics, and bioinformatics services to researchers in the agri-food sector and other fields of discovery.

“The really motivating factor was to be able to contribute to an area of research that had very direct impacts on people’s lives,” said Hammond, MSc, explaining his motivation for joining GIFS in 2022.

At GIFS, Hammond found an opportunity to contribute to a wide range of complex projects while leveraging an exciting complement of technology.

“We have the ability to really work at a huge scale of science,” said Hammond.

“The resources and technologies that we have and use here are really thrilling to be able to leverage and we can move the science that we do faster than any other time I’ve had an opportunity to do so in my career …

“It’s also sometimes a challenge, because the questions that you then need to answer with these strong technologies are that much larger.”