Research Assistant – Bioinformatician (Edinburgh)

Vacancy Reference Number

10059

Closing Date

10 Apr 2024

Salary

UE06 £31,396 to £36,024 per annum (A revised salary range for this grade of £32,982 to £38,205 is planned to take effect from Spring 2024).

Address

UK DRI at Edinburgh University, College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine, Edinburgh Medical School: Biomedical Sciences, Centre for Discovery Brain Sciences

Duration

Fixed term until 31/3/2028. Full time, 35 hours per week

About the job

Dementia is the biggest health challenge of our century.

To date there is no way to prevent it or even slow its progression, and there is an urgent need to fill the knowledge gap in our basic understanding of the diseases that cause it.

The UK Dementia Research Institute (UK DRI) is the biggest UK initiative driving forward research to fill this gap.

Researchers at the UK DRI at Edinburgh aim to piece together how all the different brain cells, systems and processes work together to keep our brains healthy over many decades. Unravelling how these finely-tuned interactions are disturbed even before a person has any specific signs or symptoms of dementia – and how changes are involved in driving disease progression – will open new avenues for the development of novel therapies.

We are looking to recruit a talented and ambitious bioinformatician / computational biologist to support a range of collaborative studies across the McColl and Priller labs.

The Opportunity

You will be joining research-intensive labs investigating neuroimmune mechanisms involved in brain health, ageing, vascular and degenerative brain diseases. This is an exciting role that will be integral to our labs and involve implementing and advancing computational methods which we use routinely as part of a multi-modal approach to addressing our scientific questions. While the role will primarily support ongoing and planned studies of the labs, there will be scope for professional development, and intellectual contributions to research design and analysis will be highly valued.

This post is full-time (35 hours per week). This is an on-campus located position, but we are open to this being supplemented with off-campus working on a task-specific basis and through prior agreement with the PIs.

Essential criteria

• Minimum of BSc or equivalent qualification and/or experience in bioinformatics, or a related computational discipline.
• Experience in bioinformatics and statistical analysis of large -omics datasets
• Excellent computer and programming skills (e.g. R, Python) and ability to develop and implement computational solutions using coding best practices.
• Good knowledge of bioinformatics tools and methods used in genomics/transcriptomics research
• Ability to work collaboratively in an interdisciplinary team and under own initiative

Contact information

To apply visit here

Informal enquiries are welcomed to Dr Barry McColl (barry.mccoll@ed.ac.uk) or Prof Josef Priller (josef.priller@ed.ac.uk).