Join our team!
Research Fellow / Senior Research Assistant (Bioinformatics)
Overview
Postdoctoral post available working with Dr Matthew Bashton and Professor Darren Smith on an exciting project concerning SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein annotation and variant calling as part of the COG consortium in collaboration with Professor Rafael Najmanovich at the University of Montreal and the rest of the COG team at Northumbria University. The post would ideally suite a someone who recently obtained their PhD or who is coming to the end of their current role, experience in structural work is of benefit too on top of bioinformatics knowledge.
Note: Some members of Northumbria University’s COG Team are funded through the HBBE, use HBBE laboratory space and certain pieces sequencing equipment.
More information on the award and our sequencing efforts with the COG Consortium below:
An ‘early warning system’ for Covid-19 Variants
Mapping Covid-19 – one year on
Northumbria University joins national genome sequencing alliance to Map spread of Covid-19
Position Overview:
Northumbria University is a member of the COVID-19 Genomics UK Consortium (COG-UK). COG-UK is a pioneer in the use of large-scale, rapid whole-genome sequencing of SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing the COVID-19 pandemic, to understand viral transmission and evolution, and to inform public health responses and vaccine development.
We seeking to appoint a highly committed and motivated postdoctoral Bioinformatician to join the COG-UK team at Northumbria. The role will involve the development of a novel spike protein variant annotation system and working on improving variant calling in samples with lower amounts of RNA (high-CTvalues). The successful applicant will be developing novel bioinformatics methodology in these areas using a wide variety of both computational techniques, experimentally derived results, and theoretical and evolutionary information from protein structure and sequence analysis.
The Northumbria COG-UK team is research led, and you will be working alongside the Northumbria COG team and within the wider COGnetwork. We routinely generate both short (illumina) and long (Oxford Nanopore)read sequencing data, and have an HPC facility for data analysis.
Knowledge of bioinformatics approaches and command-line usage is essential, as is knowledge of a programming or scripting language, such as R, Bash, and Python. Prior experience with variant calling and high throughput sequence analysis, and experience of working with protein structure are desirable.
For an informal discussion about the post, please contact Dr Matthew Bashton via email on matthew.bashton@northumbria.ac.uk
Deadline for applications: Tuesday 7th September 2021
Full details of the opportunity including how to apply can be found on the Northumbria University website here
For an informal discussion about the post, please contact Dr Matthew Bashton via email on matthew.bashton@northumbria.ac.uk
Image Credit: US Centre for Disease Control (CDC)