Senior Bioinformatician​/Computational Biologist

Do you want to help us improve human health and understand life on Earth? Make your mark by shaping the future to enable or deliver life-changing science to solve some of humanity’s greatest challenges.

We are recruiting a Senior Bioinformatician/Computational biologist to join the Vento Lab to take responsibility for single-cell and spatial transcriptomic data analysis across multiple projects centred on immune cell biology, with a particular focus on how immune cells specialise and function in the context of human reproductive tissues and women's diseases.

Equally important is a genuine engagement with the biology of the tissues under study. You will work in an environment where biological questions drive computational decisions, and where results are always interpreted and communicated in biological terms. You will either bring existing knowledge of immune cell biology and reproductive tissues, or demonstrate the curiosity and capacity to develop it quickly. The role also encompasses the analysis of CRISPR perturbation datasets;

while prior CRISPR experience is not required, familiarity with the principles of CRISPR screening is desirable, and the you will be expected to develop the same depth of critical analytical rigour in this domain as you bring to single-cell transcriptomics.

• Lead the analysis and interpretation of large-scale single-cell (scRNA-seq, snRNA-seq, spatial transcriptomics, multiomics), spatial transcriptomic and CRISPR datasets, with the ability to independently troubleshoot and resolve issues at any stage of the workflow, from sequence alignment and cell calling through to clustering, annotation and downstream biological inference.
• Using your knowledge of single-cell data characteristics (including technical artefacts, doublets, ambient RNA, batch effects, and cell type-specific QC challenges) to make and explain analytical decisions informed by computational and biological evidence.
• Using your molecular and cellular biology knowledge to design biologically informed analytical approaches, critically interpret results, and ensure that methodological decisions align with experimental design and research aims.
• Implementing innovative and creative data analysis strategies beyond standard pipelines to address complex research questions and explore new directions.
• Working collaboratively as a partner within the Vento interdisciplinary team, participating in scientific discussions and supporting problem-solving to ensure computational approaches align with experimental work.
• Communicating results clearly and in a timely manner to project leaders, collaborators and the wider scientific community, including through publications and presentations.
• Organising and keeping track of developed code and generated data within the group.

Open Targets is a public-private partnership involving the Wellcome Sanger Institute, a world-leading genomics institution, EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), a global leader in the management, integration and analysis of public domain life science data, and world-leading pharmaceutical companies GSK, Sanofi, MSD, Pfizer, and Genentech. The Open Targets (OT) research programme generates and analyses data to connect targets to diseases, assess the strength of this evidence, and help identify and prioritise targets for drug discovery.

This includes evidence that causally links targets and diseases, as well as foundational data that helps us understand biological processes and disease progression more deeply.

You are a researcher with deep experience in single-cell transcriptomics and a genuine interest in immune cell biology and tissue biology. You are motivated by the opportunity to advance our…