Bioinformatics Analyst II

Summary

The Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Baylor College of Medicine delivers cutting-edge research focused on cancer biology, stem cell biology, developmental biology, and neurobiology. The department ranks among the top ten in the nation in funding from the National Institutes of Health. Our faculty participate in the Dan L Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center, the Lester and Sue Smith Breast Center, and the Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine (STaR) Center, among others. The department is home to the Center for Precision Environmental Health. Recruiting junior faculty in both existing and emerging areas of research, such as epigenetics, cancer, and synthetic biology, we attract, train and grow top talent in a collaborative environment with an entrepreneurial spirit. Chair of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Dr. Peggy Goodell, whose lab focuses on the the basic mechanisms that regulate hematopoietic stem cells, and how their misregulation leads to leukemia development. We are interested in the basic biology of hematopoietic stem cells. It has been known for decades that hematopoietic stem cells reside in the bone marrow in a quiescent state and replenish the supply of differentiated cells of the peripheral blood throughout the lifetime of an animal. No other adult cell type retains the capacity for such immense proliferation and differentiation. However, little is known about the cells or factors that regulate their primitive state or control their activation. We study the behavior of these stem cells in vivo and in vitro using mouse stem cells as a model, as well as pursue the mechanisms which control their behavior on a molecular level using genome-wide profiling strategies and mouse mutants.

Job Purpose

The Bioinformatics Analyst II will discover and analyze genomic variation in normal human and disease populations using bioinformatics and computational techniques and concepts.

Job Duties

• Assists investigators in planning and design of experiment.
• Provides customized bioinformatics and computational support from the project design to publication phases including consulting on experimental design and assisting investigators with submission of manuscripts and/or grant applications.
• Establishes and manages an analytical pipeline for data analyses, and generate workflows in scripting language to automate bioinformatics process.
• Designs, develops and deploys robust workflows, as well as custom scripts to support the analysis of high-throughput NGS data.
• Visualizes and clearly communicates (oral and written) analysis results to an interdisciplinary audience.
• Maintains a collaborative, collegial and respectful team environment.
• Annotates and maintains collaborative computational environments and code bases with an emphasis on reproducibility and rigor.
• Designs and develops RStudio applications to enable non-computational scientists to explore complex molecular data. Utilizes R programming to extract insight from raw molecular data and provoke development of novel hypotheses.
• Designs and develops data analysis, data visualization, dashboards, graphs and figures.
• Automates reporting and provides interactivity using R.
• Stays abreast of current and emerging technologies and tools related to the field by interacting with local and external computational biologists, as well as attending scientific conferences and/or workshops related to bioinformatics.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Genetics, Biology, Bioinformatics, Biostatistics, Computational Biology, Computer Science, or a related field.
• One years of relevant experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Master’s degree in a related field.
• Experience with coding in Python or R.
• Next-generation sequencing analysis a plus.
• Experience with RNA– Sequencing, WGBS and/or ChIP- Sequencing a plus.

Other

• The person hired for this position should be able to work independently with little supervision.