Research Fellow in Bioinformatics

Job description

This is an exciting opportunity to join an internationally leading interdisciplinary team in the Department of Women & Children’s Health, King’s College London and work in collaboration with clinical researchers based in our NHS partners (Guy’s and St Thomas’ and King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trusts).

Funded by the King’s Health Partner’s Centre for Translational Medicine (CTM), this is a core post to support research generated by research teams within the CTM ‘Conception to Cradle’ programme. Our research focuses on developing new treatments to tackle infertility and multiomics approaches (including transcriptomics, genomics, metagenomics etc.) to develop new predictors for pregnancy complications.   

The bioinformatician will work under the supervision of Prof. Rachel Tribe and Dr Alessandra Vigilante (lead of the Faculty of Life Sciences & Medicine Hub for Applied Bioinformatics).

The postholder will provide support in the data integration analyses as well as statistical analysis of data. The main purpose of the role encompasses performing data integration and statistical analysis while offering comprehensive data-driven decision support by overseeing the cleaning, integration, analysis, and storage of diverse datasets.

We are looking for an ambitious candidate with established expertise in bioinformatics, specifically dealing with large data sets and data integration. Knowledge of python and R are essential.

For more information about the post, please contact Rachel Tribe (rachel.tribe@kcl.ac.uk) or Alessandra Vigilante (alessandra.vigilante@kcl.ac.uk)

The Department of Women and Children’s Health, School of Life Course and Population Sciences provides leadership for the Conception-Cradle Programme, an interdisciplinary collaboration with members of King’s Health Partners.

The postholder will primarily be located in the FoLSM Hub for Applied Bioinformatics (HAB), Guy’s campus https://www.kcl.ac.uk/research/the-hub-for-applied-bioinformatics-hab. There will be rotating sessions to meet with research teams in our other sites (e.g. St Thomas’ Hospital, Guy’s Hospital and King’s College Hospital). https://www.kcl.ac.uk/slcps/our-departments/department-of-women-childrens-health.  

This post will be offered on a fixed-term contract until 31st December 2026.

This is a full-time post - 100% full time equivalent.

Key responsibilities

• Provide bioinformatics expertise to enable members of the ‘Conception to Cradle’ collaborative to achieve their research objectives.
• Data and statistical analysis
• Dataset integration
• Keep an excellent record of analysis
• Dataset and analysis storage
• Prepare and present data to colleagues and other scientists
• Contribute to the production of research reports and publications

The above list of responsibilities may not be exhaustive, and the post holder will be required to undertake such tasks and responsibilities as may reasonably be expected within the scope and grading of the post.

Skills, knowledge, and experience

Essential criteria

• PhD degree with relevant bioinformatics experience, and in a biomedical/biological topic
• Previous experience working in bioinformatics with large datasets
• Previous experience in statistical analysis of data
• Excellent scientific analysis skills
• Excellent computer skills and programming (Python and R)
• Previous experience with imaging data analysis
• A deep technical understanding of bioinformatics analysis approaches and data
• Knowledge of relevant governance processes for data use
• Good research publication track record
• Committed to equality, diversity, and inclusion, actively addressing areas of potential bias

Desirable criteria

• Experience integrating different datasets
• Excellent computational skills applied to HPC, big data, software development and web technologies
• Bioinformatics community network connections.
• Experience in teaching bioinformatics
• Previous experience with AI and/or machine learning approaches

Closing date: 31^st March 2024

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