SEARCH CAREER OPPORTUNITIES

GENERAL SUMMARY OF POSITION: 

The Colubri and Soni Laboratories at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School are seeking to hire a Bioinformatician with expertise on data analysis, modeling, and visualization to create models and tools to better prevent, control, and manage disease. The person in this role will work on mathematical models and computational tools to simulate, predict, and understand the impact of various risk factors on disease prevalence and outcome, as well as will employ innovative approaches and health technology to address health disparities and improve clinical outcomes. The candidate for this position will have the opportunity to join in a nimble research group, and work closely with other members of the Colubri and Soni labs on the design and development of a portfolio of software applications that rely on these models for driving simulations and making predictions in research, education, and outreach settings, including Operation Outbreak (operationoutbreak.org/), an education platform on infectious diseases that use mobile apps to simulate the spread of a virtual pathogen over Bluetooth. They will be expected to perform duties in a manner consistent with a complex, diverse, and dynamic environment and serve an outstanding research, medical, and education community.  For more information, please check the Colubri lab website: https://co-labo.org/

MAJOR RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Design and execute epidemiological modeling studies, including model selection, parametrization, and validation.
• Implement reproducible computational protocols using clearly documented code.
• Parse and clean-up epidemiological and clinical datasets needed for model fitting and validation.
• Work with software engineers and UX designers to design epidemiological simulation and data collection tools.
• Participate in manuscript writing and editing for peer-reviewed publications.
• Prepare findings for internal and external presentation and publication.
• Participate in research support activities, such as grant search and writing.

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS:

• A Bachelor's degree in Biology, Biostatistics, Statistics, and/or related discipline.
• Documented experience working with infectious disease data, in either a research or applied setting.
• 1+ year experience in data management and statistical modeling.
• Strong expertise in the use of the R statistical language.
• Experience in cleaning raw data and exploratory data analysis.
• Experience in displaying results visually using visualization libraries in R and other tools.
• Experience with both deterministic and stochastic modeling.
• Understanding of various sources of biases in data.
• Knowledge of infectious disease data collection methodologies.
• Experience with best practices for documentation of scientific code, including versioning and issue tracking.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:

• Knowledge of genetic epidemiology methods.
• Experience with Monte Carlo simulation methods and knowledge of Bayesian statistics.
• Skills with additional programming languages/environments for scientific analysis (e.g., Python, SAS, Stata) a plus.
• Experience with relevant data visualization software (e.g., Tableau, ArcGIS, Nextstrain)