Bioinformatician/PDF, TRIA-For (Grant-Funded Opportunity)

Duties and Responsibilities

The Bioinformatician’s key role will be to develop and apply bioinformatics solutions to genomics research conducted by the TRIA-FoR project, a national scale, multidisciplinary network of researchers led by Carleton University and the University of Alberta. The bioinformatician will be located at Carleton University, and they will investigate resiliency and risk in the context of mountain pine beetle-climate interactions by linking genomics with quantitative genetics, population genetics, physiology, phenomics and spread risk modelling.

Key responsibilities include, but are not limited to:

1. Development and application of bioinformatic solutions to solve unique problems related to TRIA-FoR pine and mountain pine beetle research
2. Management of project databases, shared datasets, and shared analysis pipelines and documentation meeting high standards of research reproducibility and transparency
3. Active analysis as well as the training of others in:
   • Sequence analysis
   • Genome annotation
   • Gene expression and gene network analysis
   • Population genetics
4. Collaboration with TRIA-FoR researchers working in molecular biology, landscape genomics, population genetics and computational MPB spread risk modelling
5. Opportunity to prepare and publish findings using integration of genomics, landscape genomics, physiology and population genetics
6. Participate in the supervision of undergraduate and graduate students, post-docs, and other project members
7. Presentation of key findings and takeaways for project members, as well as project collaborators, stakeholders, and end-users

Required:

The candidate must have a PhD in the biological sciences or closely related field (e.g. Resource Management, Forestry, etc.), with documented experience in bioinformatics or related statistical and computational biology, custom bioinformatics pipeline development, scripting, and R analyses.

• Demonstrated conceptual and practical knowledge and skills in genomics, de novo transcriptome assembly, population genetics and genomics, comparative genomics, and genome evaluation
• A strong commitment to team-based processes and outcomes
• Excellent written and oral communication and interpersonal skills; active support of the Carleton University code of conduct
• Ability to work independently and maintain motivation during long-term analyses, and when facing bioinformatic challenges that require problem solving
• Ability to determine and manage resource requirements
• Demonstrated ability to take responsibility for a work area within a multi-disciplinary research team
• Ability to work well under pressure to meet deadlines
• A demonstrated commitment to organization and adherence to best practices of documentation and data management related to complex projects

Other desired qualifications include:

A background in scientific fields related to the project is considered an asset, including but not limited to forest biology, forest management, entomology, and ecology.

• Experience working with genomic resources for conifers or other non-model systems
• Previous work within the conifer computational biology community
• Working knowledge of Unix based systems
• Comfortable with high-performance computing especially the Canadian Alliance clusters
• Scripting in Python and R