Jobs

JOB DESCRIPTION
Posting # – RI-26-032R

POSITION: Postdoctoral Fellow in Rare Disease Bioinformatics
Polavarapu Research Group, CHEO RI
New Position
TERM: Full Time, 1.0 FTE, 2-year contract with possibility of renewal
SALARY: $28.00 – $33.00 per hour, will be commensurate with skills and experience
REPORTS TO: Dr. Kiran Polavarapu
Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute Inc. (“CHEO RI”) is the research arm of the Children’s Hospital of
Eastern Ontario – Ottawa Children’s Treatment Centre (“CHEO”) and an affiliated institute of the University of Ottawa.
We acknowledge that Ottawa is built on un-ceded Algonquin Anishinabek territory. The Algonquin Anishinabek Nation
have lived on this territory for millennia and we honour them and this land. Their culture and presence have nurtured and
continue to nurture this land. CHEO RI also honours all First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples and their valuable past and
present contributions to this land. CHEO is a beloved institution and workplace that is widely recognized for being an
anchor in our community. CHEO RI works to create new knowledge and evidence to support CHEO in its provision of worldclass care to our children. Our mission at CHEO RI is to connect exceptional talent and technology in pursuit of life-changing
research for every child, youth and family in our community and beyond.
CHEO RI has an immediate requirement for a Postdoctoral Fellow in Rare Disease Bioinformatics.
We are seeking a highly motivated and computationally skilled Postdoctoral Fellow to lead the bioinformatics aspects of
the genomics and multi-omics research activities within the Polavarapu Research Group at CHEO RI. The successful
candidate will contribute to projects focused on rare neuromuscular and neurodevelopmental disorders, with emphasis
on computational approaches to genomic data analysis, in silico variant interpretation, AI-enabled bioinformatics
approaches, and development of scalable analytical workflows.
Working within a multidisciplinary and collaborative research environment, the postholder will provide computational
and bioinformatic expertise to a team working on the integration of genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic, phenotypic,
and publicly available datasets for variant interpretation, gene discovery, genotype–phenotype studies, and translational
rare disease research.
The position involves close collaboration with clinicians, wet-lab scientists, bioinformaticians, and international research
consortia. The successful candidate will contribute to the development and implementation of modern computational
genomics workflows, including emerging AI/ML-based analytical approaches and reproducible bioinformatics pipelines.

Want to devote your expertise in data science to accelerate the pace at which new medicines are found? Our lab develops and applies methods to extract quantitative information from high-throughput biological images, integrated with transcriptomics and proteomics integrated with transcriptomics and proteomics.

More than 250 million people are chronically infected with Hepatitis B virus (HBV) with no effective cure. My lab is part of the Toronto Centre for Liver Disease, one of the largest liver clinics in North America, with an active clinical trial research program testing novel hepatitis B therapies in Phase 1- 3 clinical trials. New studies are incorporating longitudinal liver sampling with single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNAseq) to better understand the intrahepatic immune response to novel treatments in the context of viral control and liver inflammation.

We are looking for a bioinformatician with demonstrated experience single-cell RNA sequencing analysis and an interest in incorporating new artificial intelligence tools into the analysis pipeline. The anticipation is that this qualified person will be able to work with large scRNAseq datasets with cell numbers >3,000,000 cells and be able to code in relevant languages to incorporate the latest analysis tools.

This is an opportunity to work with state-of-the-art data in the context of novel drugs in early-stage clinical trials. The position will involve industry collaboration with the expectation of academic publication. There will also be internal opportunities for collaboration in our basic research projects focused HBV pathogenesis using similar samples.

We are seeking a postdoctoral researcher with strong expertise in computational biology, statistical modeling, and analysis of high-dimensional biological and clinical data to contribute to an interdisciplinary research program focused on reproducible computational pipelines for translational cancer research. The lab has a strong focus on developing computational and machine learning approaches for biomarker discovery, therapeutic response modeling, and clinical translation in oncology.

The research program includes several ongoing and evolving projects in glioma and related cancers, broadly focused on tumor microenvironment characterization, liquid biopsy analysis, clinical trial correlative and multi-omics data integration. Current work involves analysis and integration of single-cell sequencing and immune repertoire data, circulating cell-free DNA (cfDNA) for biomarker development and disease classification, metabolomic profiling in relation to clinical variables, and large-scale genomic datasets, including whole-genome sequencing from multi-institutional collaborations. These projects are representative and not exhaustive, and the scope of work may expand to include additional data types and research directions.

Together, these efforts aim to advance translational cancer research through the development and application of computational pipelines and machine learning approaches to characterize disease biology, therapeutic response, and clinical outcomes from high-throughput genomic and clinical data. The successful candidate will work in the Kevin Wang Lab at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, and will have the opportunity to contribute to multiple projects and help shape new research directions within the lab.