Applications are invited for an enthusiastic and motivated Bioinformatician to join the Food, Microbiome and Health programme at Quadram Institute Bioscience (QIB), based in Norwich, UK.

Background:

The Food, Microbiome and Health (FMH) programme establishes a knowledge and expertise hub in food science and structure, and gastrointestinal tract (GIT) microbiome function to address at the mechanistic level how food, diet and GI microbes promote health. This entails the interrogation of metagenomics, metabolomics and associated microbiome data looking at all domains in the GIT microbiome; prokaryome (i.e., bacteria and archaea), virome (phageome) and mycobiome (fungi). 

The role:

As a Bioinformatician supporting the FMH program, you will bring scientific expertise with a strong background in analysis of metagenomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics, and associated microbiome data to provide decisive answers to scientific questions.  You will be expected to assist (and perhaps lead) the interpretation of large and dense microbiome research projects generated as part of the institute program. This position has a strong focus on data analysis and visualisation (using either R or Python). A typical example is the exploratory analysis, plotting, and statistical testing of microbiome abundances from metabarcoding or metagenomics datasets.

You will be embedded within the Core Bioinformatics team for Quadram Institute Bioscience, which is composed of experienced Bioinformaticians, providing a friendly environment to enhance your skills. Our team develops reproducible and scalable analytical pipelines with a focus on promoting efficiency. There are ample computing resources for these pipelines; on either our on premises cloud computing platform or on the campus wide high performance computing (HPC) cluster. Core Bioinformatics maintains a Galaxy server, an OpenStack Cloud instance, Apptainer packages for the HPC; develops and releases Galaxy and Nextflow workflows, and organises internal training on those technologies. Both the supporting team and supporting infrastructure will accelerate your research.

You will also have the opportunity to work with researchers on publishing new methodologies, and tools which we make available as open-source software. This position is ideal for someone wanting to grow their bioinformatics experience and we will provide on the job training to propel your bioinformatics career.

The ideal candidate:

The ideal candidate will have a PhD/DPhil in bioinformatics, data science, computational biology, computing, or a related computational subject. They will have the ability to program in at least one programming language (preferably Python) and data science and data visualisation skills (for example using R). Experience in analysing large metagenome datasets, in particular, microbial metagenome short read sequence data as well as knowledge of methods for analysing microbiome datasets.

Additional information:

Salary on appointment will be within the range £35,300 to £43,750 per annum depending on qualifications and experience. This is a full-time post for a contract of 51 months.

Interviews will be held on 24 October 2023.

We are committed to equal opportunities and welcome applications from all sectors of society.  The Institute supports equality of opportunity within the workplace and expects all employees to share and display these values.  To support our commitment, we have a range of family, faith and diversity friendly working arrangements to help all staff achieve excellence in their area of work.

As a Disability Confident employer, we guarantee to offer an interview to all disabled applicants who meet the essential criteria for this vacancy.

About the Quadram Institute:

The Quadram Institute is a new interdisciplinary research institute dedicated to understanding how food and microbes interact to promote health and prevent disease. Its mission is to deliver healthier lives through innovation in gut health, microbiology and food. A partnership between Quadram Institute Bioscience, the University of East Anglia, the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital and BBSRC, it brings together scientists and clinicians in a state-of-the-art building on the Norwich Research Park. This is one of Europe’s largest centres of life sciences and home of the John Innes Centre and The Earlham Institute. (https://quadram.ac.uk/).