What are the responsibilities and job description for the Bioinformatics Analyst I position at Medical College of Wisconsin - Staff?
The Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW) brings a synergy between the best medical education, research, and patient care. Tomorrow’s discoveries happen right here alongside the very people who bring those lessons to our students. Every bit of knowledge, and every advancement, provides our students with an unprecedented, collaborative learning environment, and helps improve the vitality and care of our communities. In the role of Bioinformatics Analyst I , you will be working in the Mellowes Center for Genomic Sciences and Precision Medicine.
Our unique program focuses on how to interpret genetic variations that cause human diseases. We leverage multi-disciplinary approaches, including Big Genomics Data, systems biology, computational biophysics, biochemistry, and structural bioinformatics, to develop a more comprehensive and integrated understanding of the underlying mechanisms of diseases. Focusing on rare diseases, our team continues to pioneer the methods to use AI-based tools such as protein structure prediction to model the multi-protein complexes that regulate the genome. This focus links our work between genetics and the structure of chromatin (i.e., epigenetics) – to understand how genetic differences alter how the genome is regulated and dysregulated to cause a group of genetic diseases termed chromatinopathies.
The successful candidate will join our productive team in chromatinopathies research. They will use our established procedures and work with our multi-disciplinary group of computational scientists, rare disease clinicians, laboratory technicians, and faculty, to operate the workflow and team-based process that we have developed. The goal of our program is to diagnose more patients and increase the information available to interpret genetic variation. We are seeking a motivated and skilled data scientist, who will thrive in a team environment where they will work collaboratively and independently to solve rare disease cases, analyze diverse data, and synthesize it in reports to the team and academic publication.
Making sure you fit the guidelines as an applicant for this role is essential, please read the below carefully.
Primary Functions
- Understands principles of biomolecular structure, molecular simulations, and the interpretation of results. Independently provides troubleshooting for data generation and processing. Maintains working understanding of principles in genetics, biochemistry, molecular biology, and biophysics.
- Develops, implements, and refines bioinformatic workflows and tools for analyzing and visualizing molecular simulation data. Runs standardized workflow for annotating protein structures with genomics data.
- Leads the analysis and writing for a portfolio of modeling projects, prioritized by the team and Director. Implements triaging workflow and generates reports. Contributes to collaborative research publications. Presents regular project updates at meetings with collaborators.
- Adapts bioinformatics tools, visualization packages, and annotation resources to perform research analysis independently and accurately – flexibility and competency in data wrangling.
- Development of automated analysis methods to assess model quality and computed features, as well as the analysis of MD simulations - statistical mechanics and machine learning preferred, but not required.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills to present analysis to our group and externally, through research presentations and papers.
Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities
This position requires strong analytical skills, working knowledge of molecular biology, biophysics, and statistics, as well as experience using tools for molecular simulation, visualization, and analysis. Most of all, the successful candidate will be highly motivated to learn and be part of our ongoing work to pioneer the new field of molecular modeling for interpreting the effects of human genetic variation. Working experience with structural bioinformatics tools and algorithms is required (either in command line or IDEs). The successful candidate will join a productive team of researchers in triaging modeling cases, generating molecular models for genomic variants that pass triaging, assessing protein function and structural features through literature survey and structural bioinformatics, and applying molecular simulation to assess variants. As the lab is actively working in this application area, the successful candidate will receive training in on the established workflow and modeling process, with many opportunities to improve and expand the workflow, especially in the automation of machine learning and statistical mechanics approaches to evaluating structural and Molecular Dynamics data. At the same time, the priority for the current position is to apply our workflow to more clinical and research cases, cohorts, and towards population-level modeling. Candidates must demonstrate an ability to critically read, understand, and interpret data from scientific publications. Experience with Linux-based HPC systems is preferred, but not required. The successful candidate will be organized, detail-oriented, and an effective written and verbal communicator.
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