Summer Student Intern

The Canadian Centre for Computational Genomics (C3G) at McGill University is now accepting applications for Summer Internship positions taking place in Montreal from May 1 to August 31, 2025. We are a bioinformatics and computational genomics academic platform that provides case-by-case consulting services for the analysis and organization of large genomic data sets in addition to developing software solutions for the research community.

We are seeking applicants with a strong interest in bioinformatics, computational biology, and software development. To apply, candidates must meet the following requirements:

• Must be a Canadian citizen, permanent resident, or hold a valid Canadian study permit.
• Must be an undergraduate or graduate student, returning to their current registered faculty in the 2025 fall semester.
• Availability for full-time commitment for the duration of the internship.

Interns will be paid via stipend/award, bi-weekly payments, fixed hourly rate starting at $18.50, usually for 33.75 hours per week.

Interested students can apply using the form at computationalgenomics.ca/careers-internships and selecting Internship as the type of opportunity. We are asking candidates to clearly indicate only one or two projects (using the name or code) that are of their interest in their cover letter or CV, if they don’t the application will be considered with lower priority.

The deadline to apply is Monday March 3, 2025, at noon (EST).

For more information, please contact internships@computationalgenomics.ca

2025 Summer Internship Projects

TD01: Bioinformatics Pipeline Development

The complexity of bioinformatics analyses, coupled with the number of samples involved, means that proper workflow and data management are key components for any genomics project. We have developed an open-source workflow management system called GenPipes where we implement standard bioinformatics analyses. As part of their summer internship, the successful candidate will contribute to the development of GenPipes by helping develop an interactive new user guide to be implemented in Python. Students with an interest in big data, genomics and bioinformatics are encouraged to apply.  

TD02: Benchmarking Dashboard 

As part of the development of new genomic analyses and pipelines, we evaluate the process using standard datasets to determine the sensitivity and precision of every method. Over time, we have accumulated a large set of these standard benchmarks that represent our collective knowledge on the advantages and disadvantages of many common genomics and bioinformatics approaches. To facilitate the consultation and sharing of these results, both internally and with other research groups, we are looking for a summer intern that will compile all the results into an interactive dashboard using a scripting library in Python or R. Students with an interest in big data, genomics and bioinformatics are encouraged to apply.  

CL01: Cloud Systems Monitoring for SD4H

Secure Data for Health (SD4H) is a community cloud deployed with OpenStack. The equipment consists of CPU and GPU nodes along with four types of storage, including Object Storage and high performance CephFS  posix system. One of the main goals of the platform is to provide the scientific community with computational resources that are both elastic and secure. As more users gain access to these resources, monitoring usage and generating reports is becoming more important. We are looking for a summer intern that will work with the SD4H team to generate an interactive dashboard to monitor and report on the usage of SD4H resources. Students with an interest in cloud computing and experience in DevOps are encouraged to apply. 

DT01: Development of Data Navigation and Visualisation Tools for the Bento Platform

The C3G Data Team is involved in data management for many large scale genomics projects including the Pan-Canadian Genome Library, the Climate-Smart Data Collaboration Centre, the Quebec COVID-19 Biobank (BQC19) and many more. They have common needs to organize clinical, samples, experiments and processing data, enabling FAIR sharing to the research community. By contributing to the elaboration and implementation of standards from international initiatives such as the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH), we are part of the solution to ensure that data from genomics projects remain usable now, and in future data analysis initiatives.

In this context, we have developed the Bento web platform (https://github.com/Bento-Platform), a modular software infrastructure with services organizing data following widely accepted standards. For example, the Katsu service organizes clinical, samples and experiments data, and the Gohan service optimizes searches of the genomic data.

We are offering an opportunity in software development to help with the development of data navigation and visualization tools for the Bento platform, helping our users to make better sense of their data. Our development stack involves React with Ant Design in the front-end, and back-end services using Python, PostgreSQL and Elasticsearch.

OM01: Secondary Processing of Single-Cell RNA-Seq Data: A Fast and Memory-Efficient Add-On for Quality Control and Sample Integrity

We are seeking a motivated intern to contribute to an innovative project focused on developing a scalable and memory-efficient secondary analysis  processing pipeline for single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data. The intern will gain hands-on experience in scRNA-seq data analysis, dimensionality reduction techniques (e.g., PCA, correlation plots), and benchmark testing using public datasets.

OM02: Omics Data Analysis

The C3G Services Team is seeking a motivated intern to provide assistance on various upcoming projects at the platform. The intern will get hands-on experience with data analysis from different technologies such as ChIP-seq, RNA-seq and single-cell assays. Additionally, the candidate will add minor development upgrades to our in-house pipelines and improve our reporting and visualization toolbox.

We are seeking applicants with a strong interest in bioinformatics, computational biology, and software development. To apply, candidates must meet the following requirements:

• Must be a Canadian citizen, permanent resident, or hold a valid Canadian study permit.
• Must be an undergraduate or graduate student, returning to their current registered faculty in the 2025 fall semester.
• Availability for full-time commitment for the duration of the internship.