Research Associate, Bioinformatician

The Richards’ lab of McGill University is seeking a Bioinformatician Research Associate to assist in the creation and management of a research program to improve clinical care through the use of computational genomics. The job will take place at the Lady Davis Institute of the Jewish General Hospital, a McGill University teaching hospital. See mcgill.ca/genepi for a description of the exciting work that our lab is undertaking.
The successful candidate will work with Dr. Brent Richards’ research team in the Centre for Epidemiology and Community Studies. In collaboration with fellow staff, graduate students and external collaborators, the candidate will ensure the timely execution of a program of research to better understand how genomic information can improve clinical care.

Management and execution of multiple computational genomics research studies, including but not limited to:

• Developing bioinformatic, data science and computational methods to process data  from genome-wide genotyping, sequencing and proteomic laboratory outputs.
• To organize such data and clinical data, undertake quality control, and processing in order to prepare for release of data to scientists through the BioPortal program.
• Undertaking quality control and processing of large-scale genetics data.
• To apply novel methods to process such data.
• To create standardized, repeatable and verifiable pipelines for the QC, harmonization and release of such data.
• Collaborating with other institutions and leading scientists to execute research programs.
• Generate and maintain computational code.
• Writing scientific papers and manuals to describe the results of research programs, document their output and enable others to use the resultant code.
• Supervise graduate students to help them complete their research programs.
• General administrative tasks related to the above work program.
• Assist in writing grants to secure funding for the research program.
• Participation in the creation of new research programs.

The candidate will be required to execute these duties with little supervision.

• PhD in genetics, bioinformatics, computer science, mathematics or computational biology
• Analysis of large-scale cohorts, such as UK Biobank.
• Experience working in an HPC environment.
• Experience working in cloud computing
• Over one year’s experience in programming for research programs related to biological problems
• Comfortable leading a team of graduate students and staff
• Data analysis expertise in R and/or Python, as well as NextFlow
• Deep understanding of the files and data arising from genome-wide genotyping, whole genome sequencing and whole exome sequencing
• Bioinformatic tool expertise including: GWAS software, managing sequence data, large-dataset manipulation
• Experience in software development will be an asset