The Perinatal laboratory and research group is led by Professor Bo Jacobsson. Our research group is located at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (Oslo). We investigate genetic and environmental factors affecting human gestational age at preterm birth. We work with unique genomic data containing thousands of family trios from Norway, complemented by extensive collections of medical and questionnaire-related variables, validated environmental exposures, and a birth registry covering over four million pregnancies from Sweden.
Preterm delivery and the duration of gestation are heritable traits. Our group has recently published the largest GWAS meta-analysis of gestational duration and preterm birth to date. The researcher will contribute to ongoing efforts in this field (GWAS, meta-analyses, gene-environment interactions, etc) and to dive deeper into the known genetic variants affecting the duration of gestation and preterm delivery. We expect to expand the analyses conducted in our previous work to diverse ancestries, and to sub-phenotypes of preterm delivery.
The main task is to conduct high-quality research in perinatal medical research. There will be great opportunities to expand focus within the framework of the specified projects and the researcher’s interests. The applicant is expected to be able to contribute to other projects (from collaborators or other researchers at PerinatalLab).
Your responsibilities will include working on GWAS, meta-analyses, and gene-environment interactions, as well as analyzing genetic variants influencing pregnancy duration and preterm birth. You will work with unique datasets, including genotypic and phenotypic data from the Mother, Father, and Child cohort (over 40,000 trios), ALSPAC (~6,000 mother-child pairs), and HUNT, providing access to genetic data from 350,000 individuals linked to extensive phenotypic datasets.
The tasks include, among other things, data acquisition, quality control and analysis, dissemination of results, and supervision of master and doctoral students. Furthermore, the researcher is expected to contribute to high impact level publications.
The position involves taking a large responsibility for various types of important administrative work for the PI and the needs of the whole group related to academic research, such as grant applications, writing scientific reports and project proposals, writing ethics applications, as well as co-authoring research manuscripts, including submission to the journal process and other tasks.
To be eligible for the position, you must hold a doctoral degree in a relevant field, such as molecular biology, statistical biology, biomedical science, epidemiology, genetics, statistics, mathematics, or computer science. Experience in statistical modeling, either in the context of genetics or epidemiology, as well as ability to work in R/ Python and a UNIX environment are required.
Other qualifications are excellent oral and written English language skills, proven ability to write coherent scientific text with at least one published or submitted manuscript where the applicant is the first author and wrote a major part of the text. The position requires collaboration with colleagues and other research groups, but ability to generate and pursue research ideas independently will be essential. Fluent in Swedish is also a merit.
Advantages are:
Experience with population genetics (microarrays, GWAS, GxE studies)
Experience with large data analysis or bioinformatics
Clinical knowledge of physiology and biology of pregnancy (gestation, preterm birth, fetal growth, preeclampsia, inflammation, infection, nutrition)
Experience in molecular biology (control of gene expression
Experience with epidemiological studies
Experience in student supervision
Experience with version control in Git