The Telethon Kids Institute is one of the nation's leading medical research organisations with impressive facilities in Subiaco, Western Australia. It is home to more than 700 staff and post-graduate students who are dedicated to tackling the major causes of childhood disease, disability and disadvantage. Our research teams are among the world's best and we have strong affiliations with Princess Margaret Hospital for Children and all the major Western Australian universities, particularly The University of Western Australia and Curtin University. 2017 will be a significant year for the Telethon Kids Institute with a move to brand new premises within the new children's hospital building at the QEII Campus in Nedlands. The new building will see the Telethon Kids Institute co-located with the new Perth Children's Hospital and housed in state-of-the-art premises with increased space and improved access to leading-edge technology and research facilities.
- Passion for improving children’s health*
- Independent role*
- 12 months fixed term with a strong possibility of extension*
The laboratories of Dr Timo Lassmann, Dr Anthony Bosco and Dr Joost Lesterhuis have a joint opening for a postdoctoral position in systems biology. The position is part of a larger effort to establish a competitive personalised medicine program at the Telethon Kids Institute. The postdoc will be involved in creating and applying state of the art computational approaches for network inference to clinical problems. A strong focus will be on integrating secondary functional and other omics measurements with gene regulatory networks to identify key genes and biomarkers relevant to an individual's disease onset and progression. The work will lead to the creation of a clinical pipeline utilising omics approaches to improve patients’ well being.
There are three complementary streams involved in the project in the first instance:
- Towards personalised medicine: the candidate will develop approaches utilising large scale functional datasets from the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE), the Functional Annotation Of Mammalian genome (FANTOM) and the Roadmap Epigenomics project to construct cell type specific gene networks.These will be used to link the variome of patients to the observed disease phenotypes.
- Projecting experimental data derived from genomic studies of pathological conditions in humans and in animal models onto cell type specific gene regulatory networks, and pinpointing actionable possibilities for therapeutic intervention.
- Identification of ‘druggable’ key drivers of cancer-related cellular phenotypes: integration of transcriptomics epigenomics, proteomics and metabolomics data, which will be derived from state-of-the art animal models, as well as samples from patients. This will provide a robust analysis for identifying candidate targets and drugs that can enter a trajectory of clinical translation and commercialisation.
The position represents an exciting opportunity to work at the crossroads between basic science and clinical practise. The successful candidate will have the unique opportunity to be part of a truly inter-disciplinary team composed of molecular biologists, statisticians, computational biologists and clinicians.
The successful candidate should have:
- A PhD in a relevant subject area (e.g Computational Biology, Computer Science, Statistics or Mathematics) and a background in programming and command line UNIX/ Linux
- Experience in biological network inference or related work is a bonus
- At least two first author publications in reputed journals and demonstrated their ability to work well in a team. We expect all our lab members to be strongly self motivated and ambitious
Additional Information:
The Institute is located in Perth, Western Australia ranked by the economist intelligence unit’s (EIU) as the 9th most liveable city in the world. An exciting new building project will see Telethon Kids researchers moving into a new building co-located with the new Perth Children’s Hospital in 2017. The new state-of-the-art premises will give access to leading-edge technology, research facilities as well as increase interactions with the most innovative and progressive child health clinicians.
How to Apply:
Applicants should read the Job description available at www.telethonkids.org.au
Submit your application along with a covering letter to applications@telethonkids.org.au. Please quote the position title in the subject heading of your email application.
For further information about this position please contact: Timo.Lassmann@telethonkids.org.au
Closing 5pm, Friday July 29, 2016
