Post-Doctoral Research Fellow

Overview

Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center is an independent, nonprofit organization providing adult cancer treatment and groundbreaking research focused on cancer and infectious diseases. Based in Seattle, Fred Hutch is the only National Cancer Institute-designated cancer center in Washington.

With a track record of global leadership in bone marrow transplantation, HIV/AIDS prevention, immunotherapy and COVID-19 vaccines, Fred Hutch has earned a reputation as one of the world’s leading cancer, infectious disease and biomedical research centers. Fred Hutch operates eight clinical care sites that provide medical oncology, infusion, radiation, proton therapy and related services, and network affiliations with hospitals in five states.

Together, our fully integrated research and clinical care teams seek to discover new cures to the world’s deadliest diseases and make life beyond cancer a reality.

At Fred Hutch we value collaboration, compassion, determination, excellence, innovation, integrity and respect. Our mission is directly tied to the humanity, dignity and inherent value of each employee, patient, community member and supporter. Our commitment to learning across our differences and similarities make us stronger. We seek employees who bring different and innovative ways of seeing the world and solving problems.

This position is for a Postdoctoral Fellow to engage in biomedical studies that apply Artificial Intelligence (AI) approaches and methods with the long-term objective of improving clinical cancer care. The training, project development, and application will be mentored by Dr. Peter Nelson and Dr. Jeff Leek, and members of their research groups. The projects will integrate high dimensional clinical data with outcomes to specific therapeutics to generate ‘patient similars’ or ‘digital twins’.

The studies will also develop methodology to produce synthetic control cohorts for comparative assessments against novel therapeutics evaluated in clinical trials. The project will interface with clinical and laboratory investigators involved in the management of prostate cancer, and researchers developing bioinformatics methods that exploit AI technologies in the Fred Hutch Data Science Lab.

The Fred Hutch Data Science Lab is involved in large, education focused initiatives and biomedical research funded by NIH grants. These projects involve delivering training materials to researchers to help catalyze their work in a scalable manner, as well as innovating new methods for understanding or treating disease.

• Primary research using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and bioinformatics and biostatistical methods to better personalize treatment of cancer patients from deep and diverse types of biomedical information.
• Analysis of large‑scale clinical, genomic, and molecular datasets.
• Development and evaluation of predictive models and statistical approaches to understand treatment outcomes.
• Integration of diverse data types to identify features associated with therapeutic response, resistance, or toxicity.
• Collaboration with multidisciplinary teams to interpret findings and support translational applications.

• Developing new statistical models leveraging public and investigator collected biomedical data relating to the diagnosis and treatment of patients with cancer.
• Writing new R packages or Shiny Apps for implementation of developed methodology.
• Applying AI and machine learning (ML) tools (including Python, R, and possibly other languages) to test and evaluate biomedical hypotheses.
• Developing benchmarks and working together with staff to evaluate algorithms on those benchmarks.
• Contributing to writing papers and review of the current literature.
• Other duties as assigned.

• A PhD in biomedical sciences, epidemiology, biostatistics, statistics, computer science, machine learning, or another related statistical or computational discipline
• Creative, thoughtful, and a communicative collaborator
• Familiarity with Pyhton, R, R packages, and RMarkdown
• Experience with version control using Git Hub
• A willingness to learn new informatics content
• A careful writer and…