Bioinformatician​/Research Consultant

Position: Bioinformatician / Research Consultant

Job Description

As a UW employee, you have a unique opportunity to change lives on our campuses, in our state and around the world. UW employees offer their boundless energy, creative problem‑solving skills, and dedication to build stronger minds and a healthier world.

UW faculty and staff also enjoy outstanding benefits, professional growth opportunities and unique resources in an environment noted for diversity, intellectual excitement, artistic pursuits, and natural beauty.

The Division of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the Department of Medicine has an outstanding opportunity for a Bioinformatician / Research Consultant 4.

The Seshadri Lab is focused on studying the role of unconventional T cell populations in tuberculosis. The lab uses advanced techniques in human immunology and computational biology to characterize immune responses during infection and vaccination with mycobacteria. Their research focuses on the human immune response to Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacteria responsible for tuberculosis. By better understanding what factors are responsible for protective immunity, they hope to contribute to ongoing efforts to develop an effective vaccine.

About

this Opportunity

The candidate will join a growing team of bioinformaticians providing computational analysis and support at UW Medicine’s South Lake Union campus.

Reporting to the PI, the candidate will work with the Seshadri Lab group and will facilitate analysis of high-throughput and high-dimensional datasets generated in the context of an immunology laboratory. The lab focuses on understanding the human immune response to infectious pathogens, such as Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which is the leading infectious cause of death worldwide. The position includes ownership of projects, support of other researchers, and collaboration on community code.

This is a highly collaborative environment with opportunities to work with and learn from other bioinformaticians and immunologists as well as contribute to additional research groups in the future. The lab has active collaborations within the Computational Biology Program at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and several external collaborators, and we hope to strengthen these interactions with this hire.

This position has a high degree of autonomy and requires personal initiative, discretion, and flexibility to perform complex analytic processes related to data analysis. This employee must possess knowledge and understanding of the complexities of assessment, evaluation, and data as well as a high degree of knowledge of statistical analysis software and scripting languages, including R, Python, and bash scripting.

DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES Research (50%)

• Align and process raw sequence data using bash scripting
• Analyze high-throughput single-cell RNA sequencing data using existing R packages (e.g. Seurat)
• Work directly with bench scientists and researchers to explain and modify databases and routine analytic processes to best serve the needs of evolving projects.
• Develop user-friendly interfaces for common analytic tasks using Google Colab or Jupyter Notebooks
• Independently create and document efficient, effective and replicable methods for extracting data, writing and applying code as relevant, organizing data sources, managing data quality, and explaining complex analytic processes.
• Contribute to experimental design with downstream analyses in mind. Communicate computational methods and results to immunologists and other non-computational researchers.
• Collaborate with other bioinformaticians on reproducible workflows, shared methods, and community code projects.

Data management and analytic processes (25%)

• Perform quality assurance and routine diagnostics on data and databases.
• Develop, document, and maintain code in task-appropriate language(s) to perform data cleaning, merging, aggregation, manipulation, and formatting of datasets.

Publications, presentations, and data requests (25%)

• Create text, tables, figures, and charts for presentations, grants, and publications.
• Provide referencing and other support for presentations, grants, and publications.
• Perform power calculations or other…