Assistant professor
Department of Pediatrics
Faculty of Medicine

Dr. Sandra Isabel, M.D., Ph.D., FRCPC, is a clinician-scientist, medical microbiologist, and pediatric infectious disease specialist at the Centre hospitalier universitaire de Québec (CHU de Québec-Université Laval) since the fall of 2023. She is also a professor in the Department of Pediatrics at Université Laval. Holding an M.D. and a Ph.D. in microbiology and immunology from Université Laval, her doctoral research focused on the molecular detection of bacterial agents related to bioterrorism.

She continued her training with three residencies and a fellowship at the University of Toronto and the Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids), where she specialized in pediatrics, infectious diseases, medical microbiology, and microbial genomics. Throughout her studies, she has published 22 scientific articles on emerging infections and microbial genomics, and has filed a patent. In 2020, she identified the key D614G mutation in the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, a marker that became predominant in all virus variants. Following this discovery, she assembled an interdisciplinary team to study this mutation, producing one of the first influential manuscripts on the subject.

Dr. Isabel has used microbial genomics to reconstruct the evolutionary history of pathogens and resolve hospital outbreaks, leading to revisions in infection control practices. At Public Health Ontario (2022-2023), she led an expert group to develop a pathogen prioritization strategy based on WHO standards and worked on a framework for using microbial genomics in epidemic management. She also published a protocol for the complete genome sequencing of the virus responsible for mpox to address the global public health emergency.

Her research focuses on improving the surveillance, prevention, and diagnosis of infectious diseases using cutting-edge technologies, including genomics and artificial intelligence. She specializes in new long-read sequencing technologies for microbial genomes and their phylodynamic analysis to identify pathogens, their virulence, antimicrobial resistance, while tracing their evolutionary history to reconstruct the epidemiology of outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics in real time. She is part of an interdisciplinary and translational research team integrating genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and artificial intelligence to enhance the diagnosis and surveillance of infectious diseases. She is also actively involved in the POPCORN network, which brings together researchers, clinicians, and patient partners to form a pan-Canadian pediatric research platform addressing important questions in pediatric health.

As the director of the Culture Collection at the Centre for Infectious Disease Research (CCRI), she manages a large biobank containing over 25,000 clinical, environmental, and reference microbial strains.

Her work has been recognized with several awards: Clinician-Scientist Fellow – Junior 1 from the FRQS, Emerging Scholar Award from the Lung Health Foundation, and a Fellowship from the IMII Forum for New Researchers at CIHR.