We wish to appoint a Bioinformatician within the Autism Research Centre (ARC) at the University of Cambridge. Specifically, the post-holder will work on the "Investigating autism using genetics and epigenetics" (IMAGE) study funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation, Inc. and the Autism Research Trust, with the aim of investigating the genetics and epigenetics of autism and related traits.
The ARC conducts research into the causes of autism and Asperger Syndrome, and evaluates interventions for these conditions. The ARC is a research group within the Department of Psychiatry and its research takes place both within Cambridge and in collaboration with other universities. The Department of Psychiatry has been the top performing (quality) psychiatry group in the three most recent RAE exercises.
The Bioinformatician will work with the Director, Research Associate, and other members of the Autism Research Centre (ARC). The post-holder will be responsible for (a) analysis of data related to the IMAGE project, (b) implementing existing bioinformatics tools and pipelines from scientific literature, (c) designing and validating new pipelines for data analysis. The post-holder will also have to liaise with companies to organise the secure transfer of data to University computational resources. The post-holder may work in collaboration with other labs and service providers including the High Performance Computing Service (HPCS), and will also provide support to related projects in the ARC in terms of experimental design, statistics, bioinformatics data visualisation, and analysis. The post-holder will be encouraged to develop their own research projects based on IMAGE and ARC data.
Applicants should have a PhD in a relevant discipline (e.g. bioinformatics, genetics, computer science or big data analysis). Applicants must have advanced knowledge and experience in and previous experience in the following areas: 1. Working with whole genome sequencing (WGS) data and knowledge of the relevant command line tools in a Linux environment; 2. Scripting and statistical languages including but not limited to R and Python; 3. Previous experience or understanding of epigenetic microarray or next-generation sequencing (NGS) data analysis.
Previous experience in setting up computational resources for data analysis and knowledge of genetics and psychiatric genetics would be an advantage but not essential.
The applicant should be able to work independently, as well as have good communication skills as they will need to work well in a team and collaborate with other researchers and students.
Informal enquiries may be directed to Paula Smith (pls28@medschl.cam.ac.uk).
Fixed-term: The funds for this post are available until 14th December 2018 in the first instance.
Further details available here: http://www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/10224/
