https://careers.sciencenewzealand.org/jobdetails/ajid/LXIq8
Postdoctoral Scientist, Bioinformatics - ESR, New Zealand
A position is available for a motivated and innovative postdoctoral bioinformatician with an interest in metagenomics and infectious diseases. You will join the national reference laboratory responsible for public health surveillance in New Zealand, working among an in-house bioinformatics team that analyses pathogen genomes and metagenomes. You will be developing a method to extract pathogen typing information from clinical samples, to enable culture-independent disease surveillance. This is an 18-month fixed-term project funded by the Genomics Aotearoa (GA) Advanced Genomics Research Platform, and the successful candidate will be actively involved in the national bioinformatics and metagenomics community. Although based at ESR, leading national experts in microbial genomics at institutions across New Zealand are participating in this project, providing an especially collaborative and cross-organisational environment for the ideal candidate. This is an opportunity for an enthusiastic individual to help address an urgent unmet need in infectious disease surveillance and participate in a very active area of bioinformatics research.
Key Duties:
- Perform phylogenetic analysis of pathogen typing genes and genomes
- Perform statistical analysis to identify suitable gene targets
- Incorporate existing tools into new methods for analysing amplicon metagenomic data
- Perform statistical analysis to assay method sensitivity and specificity
- Collaborate with public health and diagnostic microbiologists on method requirements
- Participate in a national community of metagenomics researchers
Requirements:
- PhD in Bioinformatics or related discipline
- Enjoy working in a collaborative environment with biologists and bioinformaticians
- 5+ years experience analysing DNA sequences, ideally bacterial genomes and/or metagenomes
- Demonstrable history of producing and sharing bioinformatics analysis pipelines
- Expert knowledge of algorithms/tools and statistical methods in (meta)genome analysis
- High level of competency in R and a scripting language, e.g Python or Perl
- Experience with PCR and amplicon metagenomics preferred
