Jobs

The Life Sciences Department at the BSC integrates the independent research of senior scientists that work on various aspects of Computer Science applied to Life Sciences, ranging from healthcare applications of machine learning and AI to the use of High Performance Computing (HPC) for biomedical research. The Computational Biology group (http://life.bsc.es/compbio) is involved in multiple projects covering a wide range of topics, including computational systems biology, network science, digital medicine, structural biology.

The candidate will work in collaboration with senior researchers in the Computational Biology Group of the Life Sciences Department as well as other research groups at the BSC. The work is in the framework of the research lines of the group that are focused on applications of AI in Personalized Medicine, which include synthetic data generation, complex systems modelling, agent-based simulations, among others.

The Researcher will work in a highly sophisticated HPC environment, will have access to state-of-the-art systems and computational infrastructures, and will establish collaborations with experts in different areas both at international and local levels as well as from the public and private sector. The Researcher’s tasks will involve developing and deploying systems for the generation of synthetic datasets to be used for further tasks, such as training and evaluation. The Researcher is expected to be familiar with the analysis of a wide range of biomedical data and deep learning and, preferably, concepts of privacy-preserving AI (federated learning) and explainable AI (XAI).

The successful incumbent will work with the project team to lead the activities on the development, application and validation of novel approaches and workflows in the area of integrated de novo genome assembly over multiple sequencing technologies. They will develop automated bioinformatics workflow as well as assembly submission. They will also work closely together with Earth BioGenome Project (EBP) consortium on the sequencing and assembly standards. They will work with Project Leaders to ensure all scientific milestones are achieved and contribute to progress reporting as required. There will be expectations to represent the project within the global EBP consortium and the development of outreach materials and website information. Opportunities will exist for further research on the genomic information developed and for scholarly publication.​

My collaborators and I have a posdoctoral and research associate positions open related to a project in cancer genomics and informatics, specifically breast ductal in situ carcinoma (DCIS). The project is led by a multidisciplinary team comprised of Dr E Rakovitch at Sunnybrook Hospital (Toronto), Vanessa Dumeaux (Western), myself (Western) and collaborators at the OICR (Toronto), UBC (Vancouver) and MD Anderson (Texas), providing an excellent training environment. This is a CIHR funded project and involves the analysis of a large collection of profiles of DCIS tumors towards specific clinical end-points.

After nearly ten years at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the Gillis lab is moving to the University of Toronto, where the PI has been appointed Associate Professor and Bassingthwaighte Chair in Integrative Physiology. Positions are available for graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, and bioinformaticians.

The successful candidates will join a team working to understand the molecular and functional basis of cellular properties in diverse systems, including mammalian brains. This is a largescale project involving a number of complementary positions, ranging from bioinformatics, to neuroscience, to molecular genetics. While the position is solely computational, all projects involve substantial collaboration with wet-lab researchers who will be generating unique data for our analysis. This interdisciplinary work offers opportunities to address important questions in computational biology and molecular genetic with first access to large novel data sets from single-cell RNA-seq. The expected duration of the position is approximately 3-5 years with renewal at the end of each year.

A major conceptual focus of the project will be developing new ways of assessing gene expression across a large corpus of species to study the evolution of cell types. The positions offer substantial scope for training candidates interested in making a leap from computer science, evolutionary biology, neuroscience or genetics to data-focused research, particularly if it has arisen informally in their previous work.