Francis Ouellette is an Associate Professor in Medical Genetics at the University of British Columbia and a faculty member of the Michael Smith Laboratories. He did his undergraduate training at McGill University in Montreal, and his graduate training at the University of Calgary, McGill University and Simon Fraser University. He is currently the Director of the UBC Bioinformatics Centre, Director of the Canadian Genetic Diseases Network (CGDN) bioinformatics core facility where he coordinates the Canadian Bioinformatics Workshops that have trained more than 1,000 students in the past 5 years. He is also Associate Director of the Bioinformatics platform for Genome BC and co-director (UBC) of the CIHR Bioinformatics Training Program for Health Research, a joint bioinformatics training program between SFU and UBC.

After his graduate studies Francis Ouellette was manager of the yeast genome project at McGill university where yeast chromosome I and half of XVI where sequenced as part of an International effort to sequence the first Eukaryotic genome. He was then at the NCBI on the NIH campus in Bethesda MD, where he was GenBank Coordinator for 5 years. He has published a number of bioinformatics articles as well as three editions of a best-selling bioinformatics textbook. He leads a research group interested in the analysis of large biological sequence datasets, network integration, protein-protein interactions, genome annotation and comparative genomics. He has served on the SAB of research programs and biotechnology companies. Francis Ouellette is a strong advocate of open access publishing.