The Computational Genomics Research Lab (CGRLab.github.io/), led by Sina Majidian, at Chalmers, University of Gothenburg, and SciLifeLab is offering two postdoc positions at the intersection of machine learning and comparative genomics. We are interested in understanding how genes evolve across species and how mutations and genetic variants alter biological function. We have been building methods that answer fundamental biological questions and have been developing software tools for the scientific community.
Location:
Data Science and AI division, Department of Computer Science and Engineering. University of Gothenburg and Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg & SciLifeLab, Sweden.
Research Project:
Only 2% of human genome sequence codes for proteins, while most of it consists of noncoding sequences, including regulatory factor binding regions, transposable elements, pseudogenes, conserved elements, and regulatory RNAs (MicroRNAs, lincRNAs). They have important roles in gene expression, cellular function, and development. Pangenomes are collections of genome sequences from one or several species, represented as a set of raw sequences, graphs or sequence alignments. In this project, we will conduct a comparative study of noncoding genomic regions. One postdoctoral researcher will focus on developing efficient indexing methods for the analysis of large-scale DNA sequence data. A second postdoctoral researcher will develop machine learning models to address the challenges of characterizing noncoding regions.
[1] When less is more: sketching with minimizers in genomics. doi.org/10.1186/s13059-024-03414-4
[2] EvANI benchmarking workflow for evolutionary distance estimation. doi.org/10.1093/bib/bbaf267
[3] Orthology inference at scale with FastOMA. doi.org/10.1038/s41592-024-02552-8
- A PhD degree
- At least one high-quality first-author publication
- Proficiency in written and spoken English
- Strong programming skills
Interested candidates are invited to apply here forms.gle/6a4mFvYSFLj6Cauq9 by September 15, 2026.