Post-Doctoral Researcher Developmental GTEx

Post-Doctoral Researcher for Developmental GTEx

The Institute

The Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) is an international biomedical research institute of excellence, based in Barcelona, Spain, with more than 400 scientists from 44 countries. The CRG is composed by an interdisciplinary, motivated and creative scientific team which is supported both by a flexible and efficient administration and by high-end and innovative technologies.

The Developmental Gene‑Tissue Expression Project, dGTEx, aims to uncover molecular processes in postnatal development as well as genetic and non‑genetic sources of inter‑individual molecular variation, with the ultimate goal of better understanding human biology and disease. We will achieve these goals by developing novel and innovative analysis methods and approaches applied to multimodal Developmental GTEx data types from both bulk and single‑cell tissue analyses.

We have chosen to focus on the human dGTEx data, but a selected subset of the approaches proposed here will be applied to non‑human primates as well.

We are searching for a talented post‑doctoral researcher with a strong background in Computational Biology and a very good understanding of biological concepts to join the group. In particular, the researcher will contribute to the accurate annotation of the genomes of different primate species and will also participate in the implementation of computational methods to assess the causal relationship between transcriptomic and phenotypic traits.

The overarching theme of the research in our lab is the understanding of the information encoded in genomic sequences, and how this information is processed in the pathway leading from DNA to protein sequences. More specifically, we are interested in the epigenetic regulation of gene expression and RNA processing, the relationship between molecular phenotypes and higher order endophenotypes and organismal phenotypes, and the identification of functional regions on the genome of all living beings.

Our group is mostly computational, and we do both large‑scale data analysis and development of methods, but it has also an important experimental component. We participate in many large scale international functional genomics projects, such as ENCODE, GTEx, Blue Print and others.

• Strong background in Computational Biology
• Very good understanding of biological concepts
• Experience in the analysis of large‑scale omics data, specifically (single cell/bulk) RNAseq. Experience with QTL analysis and quality control would be a plus
• Experience in the development and/or implementation of algorithms and/or computational pipelines
• Background/experience in building statistical and/or machine learning methods, in particular for data integration tasks, would be a plus
• Previous experience in building and interacting with relational databases (e.g., Postgre
  
  SQL) and APIs would be a plus

• PhD in Bioinformatics or in Biology, Machine Learning, Statistics, Physics, Mathematics, Chemistry or related areas

• Highly proficient in both spoken and written English

• Strong programming skills in R or Python. Additional experience in, for example, C, C++, MATLAB, or Julia would be a plus
• Bash scripting in a Linux environment, ideally tailored to an HPC infrastructure
• Multivariate statistics
• Containerized workflows and DSLs, e.g.:
  Nextflow, Snake Make,
• Familiarity with deep learning libraries like Tensor Flow and Pytorch would be a plus

• Project management
• Interdisciplinary research
• Capacity to work independently, but also ability to interact with others, both with colleagues within the group and from the project consortium
• Good (academic) writing and presentation skills
• Imagination, Motivation, Curiosity, Pro‑activity, Independence, Critical thinking

• Contract duration: Technical and scientific activities contract linked to the project (estimated 20 months)
• Estimated annual gross salary: Salary is commensurate with qualifications and consistent with our pay scales
• Target start date: As soon as possible

We provide a highly stimulating…