With a Doctor of Philosophy in integrative molecular medicine, Ivan Hartling (BSc Honours ’14) now works as a bioinformatician within the Big Data Institute at the University of Oxford. He’s a long way from his hometown of Salmon Arm, B.C., where as a child he was inspired by seeing his mom work in the lab at Shuswap Lake General Hospital.
“My mom was a lab technologist, so I would visit her at the lab sometimes. I think that made me naturally attracted to the lab environment,” says. “And I’ve always had an interest in science — that and hockey.”
After high school, Hartling took time off to pursue his sport, but soon realized he missed the intellectual stimulation of the classroom. He started his studies at the University of the Fraser Valley before transferring to Thompson Rivers University (TRU), where he majored in chemical biology.
Finding his place at TRU
At TRU, Hartling thrived in the Honours Program, working closely with professors John Church and Kingsley Donkor.
“You have a lot of access to the professors at TRU and it’s really easy to talk to them and work with them,” he says.
In his final year at TRU, he collaborated on his first research article, which was published in the Canadian Journal of Animal Science, and has worked on more than a dozen others since. Thanks to the connections he made at TRU, Hartling made the move to UBC for his master’s degree and then crossed the pond to Switzerland, where he completed his PhD at the University of Zurich. Along the way, he spent a substantial amount of time doing lab work on several research teams, from measuring fat soluble vitamins in meat and dairy products and studying meat tenderness to developing methods for measuring lipids involved in inflammation.
While completing his PhD, Hartling’s research became increasingly complicated, requiring the use of computational tools to conduct the intricate analysis he needed, which he found interesting. That interest in data analysis and bioinformatics led him out of the lab and to his current position at Oxford, where he applies machine learning methods to predict the success of kidney transplants. Working in partnership with the UK’s National Health Service, his research focuses on deceased kidney donors, aiming to understand why those transplants often underperform compared to living donations.
“With living donors, the transplantation works much better, but there is a shortage of living donors, so there is a dependency on deceased donors. Unfortunately, deceased donations generally don’t function quite as well and we’re trying to figure out why — and how to predict it,” he says.
Making plans for the future
In addition to being the place that expanded his educational horizons, the University of Zurich is also memorable for being the place he met his wife, Marie, a French researcher who now leads pre-clinical vaccine development at Oxford.
Hartling’s current research position ends in February 2026, so he and Marie are starting to plan their next professional steps — what they will be researching and where is still to be determined.
“I really like the inflammation research that I did in my PhD, and so inflammation is a topic that I would be interested in going back into. I’m also interested in things to do with aging and age-related diseases,” he says, adding they are open to relocating for the right opportunities and are considering options in London, Cambridge, or possibly, a return Canada.
His passion for science and love of learning has taken him around the world, but Hartling remains grateful for his roots in B.C. and being able to take his first steps as a researcher at TRU.
