Postdoctoral Research Scientist

PI name: Crispin Miller 

Project Title Multimodal integration of pre-clinical models with patient datasets 

Salary: from £37,000 to £44,852 subject to experience, plus relocation allowance and visa costs if required. 

Contract term: Fixed up to 6 years, subject to successful review at Year 3

About us

A position is available within the Computational Biology Group at the CRUK Scotland Institute. The Institute is a world leading cancer research institute situated in the vibrant city of Glasgow. It hosts approximately 60 postdoctoral researcher scientists at any one time. The Institute has an excellent reputation for fundamental cancer research, including world-class metabolism studies and renowned in vivo modelling of tumour growth and metastasis.  

Project outline

A position is available within our group for a computational biologist interested in the integration of pre-clinical cancer datasets with patient data. They will make extensive use of High Performance Computing (HPC) to do this at scale. The successful applicant will work with multimodal data derived from both bulk and single cell analyses, spatial platforms including CosMX and Xenium, and across multiple tumour types including pancreas, colorectal, lung, and liver cancers.

Technological advances including high throughput sequencing, imaging and spatial technologies, have led to the establishment of large public-domain cancer data collections, derived both from human tumours and pre-clinical models. These range from cell lines through to complex Genetically Engineered Mouse Models (GEMMs) that enable the study of systemic phenomena of particular importance in cancer, including immune cell interactions, migration and metastasis. Our group uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to stratify cancer patients according to the molecular and phenotypic characteristics of their tumours, and then to ‘disease position’ existing preclinical datasets against these patient-derived cohorts (Müller, et al. Nature, in press). We use these approaches to facilitate forward- and back-translation between mechanism, models, and clinic.

These approaches, which require, amongst other things, the systematic re-processing, normalisation, dimensionality reduction, modelling, and clustering of multimodal datasets are computationally intense. To do this, we access both local and national HPC infrastructure.

The post will require extensive experience analysing large bioinformatics datasets, and familiarity with the state of the art R, BioConductor, and Python libraries for analysing genomics data. Experience with imaging modalities would convey a significant advantage, but is not a prerequisite for the position. 

The post will appeal particularly to computational biologists who enjoy working within a highly interdisciplinary and collaborative team that combines computing and mathematical expertise with molecular biology and clinical science.

For informal enquiries, please email crispin.miller@glasgow.ac.uk 

Employee Benefits

• Competitive salary
• 40.5 days annual leave including bank holidays (pro-rata)
• Defined Contribution pension scheme
• Life Insurance scheme
• Employee Assistance Programme
• Season ticket loan
• Additional maternity pay at 6 month’s full pay (subject to service)
• Shared parental leave
• Cycle to work scheme that could save you 26-40% on a bike and accessories.
• Access to Employee benefit schemes with discounts on supermarkets, cinema, travel and much more.
• On-site secure parking 

All applications must be made via our website by clicking on the 'Apply' button above.

Closing Date: 21^st February, interviews to be held the week commencing 17^th March 2025

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