Bioinformatics Postdoc – Wastewater Antimicrobial Resistance @UCalgary

The bioinformatics postdoc will be part of an interdisciplinary research team that is using wastewater to track the dynamics of infectious agents. We have developed an integrated surveillance network monitoring 43 municipalities, as well as several sentinel surveillance hubs including a large number of tertiary care hospitals and populations of special interest from which we collect samples 1-3x per week. The successful applicant will join a productive transdisciplinary team with supporting research funding from CIHR, Genome Canada, and Alberta Health. The postdoc will work as part of a large team that includes several staff with PhDs, graduate students, and undergraduates. They will report to Michael Parkins (Section Chief of Infectious Diseases, Cumming School of Medicine) and Srijak Bhatnagar, Bioinformatics lead, Faculty of Science and Technology).

The position is based at the University of Calgary.

The postdoc will utilize archived and newly collected wastewater samples for metagenomics and other bioinformatics analyses for the detection of antimicrobial resistance that is relevant to community public health. This includes AMR gene detection and profiling, plasmid colonization, DNA-ligation based metagenomics, etc.

• PhD in bioinformatics, microbiology, molecular biology, or a related field
• Strong experience in bioinformatics, preferably (meta)genomics of antimicrobial resistance or wastewater environment
• Experience in High Performance Computing (HPC) or cluster computing for bioinformatics analyses
• Experience in scripting in Python and/or R, use of software for genomic or metagenomic analysis, and data visualization
• Experience with biostatistical approaches is desirable