Project Scientist

University of California, San Diego
Department of Medicine
United States CA La Jolla
www.mesirovlab.org

Description

The Mesirov Lab in the UCSD Department of Medicine seeks an exceptional candidate who is passionate about helping genomics researchers accelerate the pace of biomedical research through the use of advanced software tools to analyze their data. The Project Scientist will work with a group that develops and maintains the Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (GSEA) software and its companion Molecular Signatures Database (MSigDB) of annotated gene sets. The Molecular Signatures Database (MSigDB) is a heavily used resource. It is comprised of 8 collections of annotated gene sets for use with GSEA software, a computational method that determines whether an apriori defined set of genes shows statistically significant, concordant differences between two biological states. It is the community standard for elucidating underlying biological mechanisms from gene expression (and other types of) data. While initially developed for use with the GSEA software, MSigDB is now also recognized as a valuable independent resource. Since the GSEA software and the MSigDB were first publicly released in 2005, over 140,000 users have registered to use the resource and more than 12,000 scientific publications cite the method and the resource. These projects are funded by the National Cancer Institute.

The Project Scientist will be responsible for the curation, enhancement, and management of MSigDB. Gene sets are manually curated from public databases and the biomedical literature, and computationally from experimental gene expression profiles. The Project Scientist will also be responsible for supporting and training users of the GSEA and MSigDB resource. The Project Scientist will work as part of an interdisciplinary team of biologists, medical researchers, computational biologists, and software developers.


Qualifications

Candidates must have a PhD degree in the life sciences, bioinformatics or related discipline, or a combination of education and experience. Candidates must be capable of in-depth review and understanding of the biomedical literature. Candidates must have experience with analysis of genomic data, including work with gene expression or other functional data.

Candidates with experience with public genomics resources, including experimental data repositories, annotation tools, biological pathway databases are preferred.


Start date

As soon as possible

How to Apply

Apply by October 23, 2018 to ensure full consideration by the committee.

Go to apol-recruit.ucsd.edu/apply/JPF01823, click Apply Now, and follow the instructions on the following page.


Contact

Jill Mesirov
jmesirov@ucsd.edu