Senior Research Fellow (Bioinformatician)

About us

The UCL Institute for Global Health (IGH) is at the heart of UCL’s Grand Challenge of Global Health. The Institute’s vision is for a world where international policy on global health is informed by world-class research. IGH aims to support the development of robust solutions to aspects of the world’s major global health challenges through scholarly outputs, education, public engagement, translational research, and ultimately by influencing public policy and professional practice.

The successful applicant will be based primarily at the Wellcome Sanger Institute on the Wellcome Genome Campus, nine miles south of Cambridge. The Wellcome Sanger Institute is a world-leading genomics institute at the forefront of experimental, computational, and translational genomic research. Using genome sequences to advance understanding of human and pathogen biology, the Institute drives improvements in human health and explores the diversity of complex organisms. Research at the Institute addresses some of the most difficult challenges in genomics, demanding science at scale, with a visionary and creative approach that continually pushes the boundaries of knowledge in new and exciting ways.

About the role

This Bioinformatician position is ideal for an ambitious and highly motivated postdoctoral scientist who will be integral to innovative microbiome work within the Children Growing up in Liverpool (C-GULL) programme of research.

This Bioinformatician position is directly linked to the multi-year 4M enhancement to the C-GULL study. The key challenge in the role will be in managing and analysing large-scale gut microbiome metagenomic datasets (tens of thousands of samples), with responsibility for developing and maintaining pipelines, databases, and scalable workflows. The post holder will be responsible for maintaining and innovating core bioinformatics activities for the 4M project, specifically shotgun metagenomics pipelines and reference genome databases.

About you

The successful candidate must have a PhD in bioinformatics, metagenomics or genomics (or similar), or equivalent working experience in related discipline.

The successful candidate must have experience in developing, implementing, and maintaining bioinformatics pipelines (e.g., Nextflow or Snakemake) with clear documentation. They must also have excellent track record of research productivity, demonstrated through a strong publication record, including high-impact papers, preferably in microbiome and microbial genomics.

The ideal candidate will have detailed understanding of the gut microbiome and its role in human health and disease and demonstrated experience in handling large-scale microbiome or pathogen genomics datasets. They will be proficient in one or more programming languages (e.g., Python or R) and they will have knowledge of Linux/Unix, SQL, and high-performance computing environments.

Data presentation skills to generate high-quality graphs, plots and figures suitable for scientific publication is also an essential criterion for this role.

Customer advert reference: B02-09739

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