Bioinformatician

Title: Bioinformatician

Position Summary: We are seeking a bioinformatician with immunology experience to join a multidisciplinary team developing leading-edge genomics analysis tools to understand the immune system's response to cancer. This self-motivated, detail-oriented individual would join the Therapeutics and Innovations group and will be responsible for developing and applying bioinformatics methods to immuno-oncology clinical datasets, creating descriptive summary statistics and data visualizations, and technical reports.

Primary Responsibilities

• With the assistance of a multidisciplinary team, develop or enhance computational tools to predict antigenic somatic variants

• Assist bioinformaticians and data scientists in developing approaches to gain better understanding of T-cell receptor binding to MHC-peptide complexes.

• Use internal and external genomics data sources to understand how somatic and germline variation impacts the immune system’s response to cancer

• Run and enhance established immune repertoire sequencing pipelines and workflows for NGS analysis in a clinical setting

• Prototype, develop, document, deploy, and support novel clinical DNA and RNA sequencing analysis approaches NGS analysis

• Benchmark new tools for sequencing data analysis and propose improvements

• Develop QC metrics, gold standard datasets and tools for systematically testing and evaluating the accuracy of newly developed assays and methods

• Collaborate with technical teams in specifying requirements for tools to enhance workflow efficiency, turnaround times and robustness

• Participate in internal research projects and external research collaborations

• Assist in preparing text and figures for manuscripts and external presentations

• Summarize results in written or oral reports for computational biologists, molecular biologists, clinicians, and internal researchers

Required Skills / Experience

• Great understanding of immunology and human genetics (understanding of oncology is preferred).

• Experience analyzing genomic sequencing data from Illumina platforms

• Experience analyzing long-read nucleic acid datasets such as PacBio or Oxford Nanopore

• Experience analyzing high-throughput RNA-seq data

• Familiarity with using and scripting in UNIX shell (e.g. Bash)

• Strong programming skills in common bioinformatics scripting languages (e.g. Python, R)

• Ability to collaborate and communicate with other scientists, researchers and clinicians

• Demonstrated project management skills and ability to produce readable, reproducible and documented code (e.g. Jupyter, R markdown, etc)

• Strong team-oriented work ethic with open, honest, and considerate communication skills

• Immune repertoire analysis experience is a plus(e.g. Immcantation, MiXCR, TRUST4, immunarch, etc)

• Experience writing SQL queries for data retrieval is required is a plus

• Exposure to cancer genomics somatic variant calling is a plus

• Experience working with large external data sources such as IEDB, iReceptor, VDJdb, and others is a plus

Education /Experience

• PhD degree in bioinformatics, computational biology, statistics, immunology, or a related field; or MS degree with 3+ years of post-graduation experience in bioinformatics, biology, computational biology, statistics, immunology, or a related field.