Research Associate in Computational Biology

The role

A postdoctoral position is available under the guidance of Dr Thomas Gorochowski in the School of Biological Sciences (University of Bristol) in collaboration with Dr Thomas Ouldridge (Imperial College London) as part of a multidisciplinary and multi-institutional grant called EEBio, which investigates ways to improve the robustness of engineered biology using feedback control. This is a 3-year position (with possibility of extension) and a start date as soon as possible. It is expected that the PDRA will work closely with other PDRAs across the EEBio programme at the Universities of Bristol and Oxford, as well as Imperial College London.

What will you be doing?

You will focus on the development of a computational platform to accelerate our ability to engineer biology across scales – from molecular circuits to cellular communities. This will include the creation of new computational tools and integration of existing software such that researchers can effectively design and test biological systems in silico and carry out detailed analysis of associated experimental results. We expect the creation of domain specific languages (DSLs) to help simplify how researchers interact with the system, development of digital biological twins to simulate biology across scales, and the adoption of data standards (e.g., the Synthetic Biology Open Language) to improve data integration with other external tools. To improve accessibility, you will also explore ways to provide these services via cloud computing resources and dedicated servers.

You should apply if

You should have extensive experience in software engineering. You should have a real passion or emerging interest in how we can engineer biology, and a demonstrated ability to pick up new skills and work well in a diverse, multidisciplinary team. Hands-on experience working with Rust and Julia programming languages, high-performance computing (e.g., GPU programming), and building extensible software would be a plus.

Additional information

For informal enquiries please contact: Dr. Thomas Gorochowski (thomas.gorochowski@bristol.ac.uk)

Relevant publications:

[1] Sarvaharman et al. Scalable design of repeat protein structural dynamics via probabilistic coarse-grained models. bioRxiv, (2024).

https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.03.13.584748

[2] Gilliot & Gorochowski. Effective design and inference for cell sorting and sequencing based massively parallel reporter assays. Bioinformatics 39, btad277 (2023).

https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btad277

[3] Myers et al. A standard-enabled workflow for synthetic biology. Biochemical Society Transactions 45, 793-803 (2017).

https://doi.org/10.1042/BST20160347

[4] Der et al. DNAplotlib: programmable visualization of genetic designs and associated data. ACS Synthetic Biology 6, 1115-1119 (2017).

https://doi.org/10.1021/acssynbio.6b00252

[5] Gorochowski. Agent-based modelling in synthetic biology. Essays in Biochemistry 60, 325-336 (2016).

https://doi.org/10.1042/EBC20160037

Our strategy and mission

Advert information