EMBL is Europe’s flagship research laboratory for the life sciences – an intergovernmental organisation performing scientific research in disciplines including molecular biology, physics, chemistry and computer science. We are an international, innovative and interdisciplinary laboratory with more than 1600 employees from many nations, operating across six sites, in Heidelberg (HQ), Barcelona, Hinxton near Cambridge, Hamburg, Grenoble and Rome.
You will work in the Bork group, which harbours a wide range of intertwined activities in the area of computational biology. Many of these are currently applied to microbiomics, with the focus on the human gut, but increasingly also on other environments such as ocean or soil. Metagenome-wide association studies are coupled with targeted approaches and also, in the context of local collaborations, with experimental analysis of synthetic and ex-vivo microbial communities.
The post holder will analyse and integrate new and existing datasets to study the microbiome of hosts and their global environments and the implications these have for human health. Particular focus areas will include high-resolution analyses of microbial communities (e.g. at sub-species or strain-level) as well as the infant microbiome, where questions such as microbial transmission and the effect of probiotics on microbiome and human development will be explored. The required tasks will involve developing and applying bioinformatics methods to mine large multi-‘omics datasets from various biological systems. The work will comprise technical as well as discovery aspects and will be carried out both independently and with internal and external collaborators. The post holder will also mentor trainees, provide hands-on guidance in their research, and teach technical and analytical skills.
You should have a PhD in a field related to Computational Biology as well as a solid training in Microbial Ecology, Computer Science, and Microbiomics. At least 1.5 years of postdoctoral and practical experience analysing metagenomic datasets is required and you should at least have experience in 16S rRNA and shotgun metagenomics profiling.
Strong motivation, excellent scientific skills as well as willingness to work in a multicultural & interdisciplinary environment are essential. As part of the work involves international collaborations, project management, communication and presentation skills as well as the ability to work in a team are also required. You should be familiar with the UNIX environment and have advanced experience in programming. Excellent data analysis skills in R or python are also required.
Please apply online: www.embl.de/jobs/searchjobs/index.php?ref=HD01593&newlang=1&srch_trm=HD01593.