Applications are invited for a Postdoctoral Research Scientist to join the Laboratory of Prof Anthony Hall in the Organism and Ecosystems Programme at the Earlham Institute, based in Norwich, UK.
Background:: The Postdoctoral Research Scientist will join Designing Future Wheat; a cross-institutional BBSRC programme aiming to ensure the delivery of robust wheat crops to support a growing population. Under the supervision of Anthony Hall and Mark McMullan, the candidate will use large genomics-based data sets to address fundamental questions in the evolution of plant pathogens to advance crop science.
The project is a collaboration between the Earlham Institute and Rothamsted Research on Take-all fungus evolution, resistance, and biocontrol with Kim Hammond Kosack. The project will use state-of-the-art approaches for pan- and whole genome comparisons of 20 fungal genomes along with population genetics techniques to investigate genetic variation across hundreds of re-sequenced genomes.
The analysis of these genomes is initially to address fundamental questions on the evolution of wheat pathogens and questions on their evolution using wild and agricultural representatives with an aim to develop analysis pipelines for the community for species agnostic analyses.
The role:
The Postdoctoral Research Scientist will join an exciting project in conjunction with the Hall group to analyse fungal wheat pathogen genomes. We are looking for a driven candidate to make a change in providing solutions to agricultural problems through coding and implementation of new software.
This role will be responsible for the design, implementation, and deployment of software pipelines for the integration of the fungal genomic and genetic data available for wheat and related species to build a toolbox for population analyses for fungal and wheat genomes.
The candidate will work independently, with other group members and national and international collaborators to develop computational tools and pipelines to analyse these large datasets. They will play an active part in EI’s collaborative wheat genomics efforts aimed at advancing wheat research through data integration and enhancing communication between bioinformaticians, scientists and breeders. The candidate will work closely with the Grassroots Genomics, 10 plus wheat genome project, Ensembl Plants and other collaborative wheat projects.
The ideal candidate:
The successful candidate will be educated to PhD level or possess equivalent experience of working in molecular or computational biology, with an interest in pan-and/or population genomics. Candidates will need to communicate a deep understanding of bioinformatics tools and molecular biology/computational methods. They will need to show knowledge of good practice principles for software engineering and have a proven track record in the use of programming languages (e.g., Python, R, Bash). Good communication skills are essential as is the ability to work well as part of a team.
Additional information:
Salary on appointment will be within the range £33,050 to £40,750 per annum depending on qualifications and experience. This is a full-time post for a contract of 36 months.
Interviews will be held on 2nd September 2022.
For further information and details of how to apply, please contact the Human Resources team on 01603 450462 or nbi.recruitment@nbi.ac.uk quoting reference 1004309.
As a Disability Confident employer, we guarantee to offer an interview to all disabled applicants who meet the essential criteria for this vacancy.
Closes: 23rd August 2022