Dementia is the biggest health challenge of our century.
The UK Dementia Research Institute (UK DRI) is the biggest UK initiative supporting research to fill this gap.
Colleagues at Cardiff University have discovered over 27 risk genes for dementia which implicate the innate immune response in determining a person’s susceptibility to developing Alzheimer’s disease. Building on their world-class expertise in genetics and immunology, the UK DRI at Cardiff University will use these discoveries as the starting point for understanding disease mechanisms and producing new therapies.
Job description
We have an exciting opportunity to appoint an enthusiastic and experienced computational biologist to join Professor Caleb Webber’s research group within the UK Dementia Research Institute at Cardiff University.
The post holder will play a leading role in a research project identifying the molecular mechanisms Parkinson’s disease (PD) through bioinformatics and functional genomics analyses of Parkinson’s disease genetics and gene expression data from human samples and stem-cell models with a particular focus on single cell readouts.
The role holder will work independently and as part of a multi-disciplinary team, to perform self-directed analyses using in house and publicly available datasets for high impact, peer-reviewed publications. Applicants should be knowledgeable and enthusiastic with the ability to multi-task and communicate effectively.
Core tasks will include bioinformatics and functional genomics analyses, with a focus on single cell data and stem cell models.
The post holder is expected to contribute to mutiple research projects with Prof Webber’s DRI programme and beyond.
The post holder is expected to interact/collaborate with different research groups at the DRI at Cardiff University, but also members of others DRI (UCL/Cambridge/Edinburg/KCL/ICL). Therefore collaborative working is a key component of this role and effective communication skills will be vital in order to cultivate international collaborations across a number of academic institutions.
For more information and to apply, please click here.
Person criteria
The successful applicant will have proven expertise in large-scale data analyses and manipulation, including single cell data analyses. Expert knowledge of data manipulation in a UNIX/Linux environment and proficiency in high level programming languages such as Perl, Python, or R Statistics is essential along with a good biological knowledge of neurodegenerative disease.
