Research Associate in Genetics

About us:

This post will be based at the Department of Basic and Clinical Neuroscience at King’s College London within the Personalised Medicine team led by Dr Ahmad Al Khleifat. 

Our team currently include several staff and students and we have extensive experience in the development of genomic and bioinformatics tools and methods. We are part of the School of Neuroscience within the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN). The IoPPN is a leading centre for mental health and neuroscience research in Europe. It produces more highly cited outputs (top 1% citations) on psychiatry and mental health than any other centre (SciVal 2023), and on this metric has risen from 16th (2014) to 4th (2023) in the world for highly cited neuroscience outputs. In the 2021 Research Excellence Framework (REF), 90% of research at the IoPPN was deemed ‘world leading’ or ‘internationally excellent’ (3* and 4*). More info about the IoPPN are available here www.kcl.ac.uk/ioppn/about

The postholder will work closely with Dr Alfredo Iacoangeli at the Department of Biostatistics and Health Informatics, and Professor Ammar Al-Chalabi in addition to collaborating with the members of King’s Motor Neurone Disease Care and Research Centre, The UK MND Institute, and large international consortia such as the EU JPND funded STRENGTH, and Project MinE.

About the role:

We are recruiting a highly motivated postdoctoral geneticist to join a collaborative initiative between King’s College London and leading industry partner. This programme aims to identify and validate potential targets for treatments for Motor Neurone Disease (MND) through comprehensive genomic research. By analysing large-scale epigenetics datasets, our objective is to identify and validate potential therapeutic targets and study their underlying mechanisms to accelerate the development of effective MND treatments. The successful candidate will join a team of neuroscientists and computational experts at the King’s MND Care and Research Centre, where they will have a leading role in developing computational analysis methods and analysing large-scale multi-omics datasets comprising thousands of samples. The post will be based within Dr Ahmad Al Khleifat Personalised Medicine team at the Department Clinical Neuroscience also working closely with Dr Alfredo Iacoangeli at the Biostatistics and Health Informatics.

This is a full time, and you will be offered a fixed term contract until 1 Nov 2025.

About you:

To be successful in this role, we are looking for candidates to have the following skills and experience:

Essential criteria

1. PhD in relevant subject area (or pending results), e.g. bioinformatics, life sciences, biotechnology, biophysics, etc
2. UpToDate knowledge of NGS pipelines
3. Strong background in the detection and interpretation of structural variations
4. Programming in at least one language (Python, Java, Bash, Perl, R)
5. Proficient in Unix based systems
6. Publication records commensurate with grade
7. Ability to work independently without direct supervision
8. Proven experience in analysing high-throughput genomic data, particularly WGS and GWAS datasets.

Desirable criteria

1. UpToDate knowledge of machine learning methods applied to clinical or omics data
2. Research experience in Neuroscience
3. Experience in working with large genomic datasets and cloud computing environments.

Please note that this is a PhD level role but candidates who have submitted their thesis and are awaiting award of their PhDs will be considered. In these circumstances the appointment will be made at Grade 5, spine point 30 with the title of Research Assistant. Upon confirmation of the award of the PhD, the job title will become Research Associate and the salary will increase to Grade 6.

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