Associate Scientist, Postdoctoral Fellow - Systems Biology/Virology

Merck•Upper Gwynedd Township, PA

20d•Onsite

About The Position

Associate Scientist, Post Doctoral Fellow-Systems Biology/Virology Our company is a global health care leader with a portfolio of prescription medicines, vaccines and animal health products. Today, we are building a new kind of healthcare company – one that is ready to help create a healthier future for all of us. Our ability to excel depends on the integrity, knowledge, imagination, skill, and teamwork of an individual like you. To this end, we strive to create an environment of mutual respect, encouragement and teamwork. As part of our global team, you will have the opportunity to collaborate with talented and dedicated colleagues while developing and expanding your career. Job description: Applications are sought for a post-doctoral opportunity in the company's Research Labs division of our company. The individual will support our company's discovery & development efforts at West Point, PA. The company's Research Labs, is looking for a passionate and talented systems biologist with expertise in the generation and analysis of complex multi-dimensional and multi-scale biological data to join our research team and support our company's discovery & development efforts at West Point, PA. Candidate with experience studying virus-host interactions will be preferred. In this role, you will be at the very leading-edge of therapeutic research and development, developing and implementing experimental and computational tools in a dynamic and scientifically rigorous environment. You will operate in a highly collaborative and matrixed organization and engage with cross-functional teams of experimental and computational biologists, data scientists, and colleagues across the company's ecosystem to drive a therapeutic pipeline. The successful candidate will be a scientifically curious team player and self-motivated learner with previous knowledge of functional genomics-driven experimental strategies at the bulk and single-cell scales and an interest in developing and using technology solutions (algorithms/tools/etc) to aid in our interpretation of complex biological data especially at the interface of virus-host interactions. An ability to communicate clearly and collaborate effectively with colleagues from different disciplines will be essential. This role is based at our West Point, PA location. In this role, you will:

Requirements

Candidates must hold a Ph.D. or Ph.D Ph.D. completed within 6 months of hire in Systems Biology, Computational Biology, Genomics, Virology, Immunology, or related field.
Demonstrated experience with both experimental computational strategies and interpretation of large-scale biological data such as various sequencing modalities, pooled/arrayed CRISPR-based screens.
Demonstrated fluency with generation and/or analysis of large-scale NGS experimental datasets (e.g., RNAseq, WES, scRNAseq, spatial transcriptomics, etc).
Demonstrated experience with statistical hypothesis testing methodology and machine learning concepts and methods.
Experience with integrating results generated from multiple data sources (e.g., different 'omics data sets), and biological knowledge bases to extract meaningful biological insights.
Fundamental knowledge of virus-host interactions including immunology and molecular virology.
Fluency with experimental and/or computational methods for generating and interrogating high-dimensional biological data. Programming skills with application in statistical analysis (e.g., R, Rshiny, tidyverse, Python, MATLAB), and ability to distill complex data into interpretable visualizations.
Experience with cell culture, virus propagation, RNA/DNA extractions, preparation of sequencing libraries, molecular biology tools, experimental design strategies.
Experience with HPC, AWS cloud computing infrastructure and Linux environments, version control systems, such as Git (e.g., Github) highly desirable.

Nice To Haves

Understanding the pros and cons of various algorithms for DNA-seq, RNA-seq, single-cell RNA-seq and/or functional genomics data.
Familiarity with the data and analytic capabilities of public repositories.
Familiarity with public databases, and repositories of DNA, RNA, protein, single-cell, as well as functional genomics data.
Experience extracting meaningful biological insights from high-dimensional biological readouts.
Publication record in virology/systems biology.

Responsibilities

Directly contribute to therapeutic development through rigorous design and/or implementation of high-dimensional functional genomics and cellular profiling assays in virus infected cells, including in vitro and in vivo pooled/arrayed CRISPR screens, single-cell transcriptomics and lineage tracing, as well as experimental and in silico derived proteomic datasets.
Perform statistically rigorous quantitative analyses while employing reproducible research and data integrity practices on large-scale biological datasets.
Analyze, interpret, and summarize complex biological data and employ data visualization tools to facilitate communication of findings to broader audiences.
Identify, analyze, and integrate internal and external data and knowledge resources to enable data mining in a biological context and inform actionable learnings to drive pipeline development.
Develop and implement experimental and/or computational methods to integrate findings from functional genomics screens and other data sets (including RNA-Seq, DRUG-seq, WGS, CRISPR, single cell RNA-Seq, proteomics, and metabolomics) with additional biological data streams to generate deep biological knowledge and drive innovation.
Provide clear interpretation of high-dimensional data and propose candidates for further computational and biological interrogation.
Engage with cross-functional teams to translate biological hypotheses into experimental and/or computational interrogations of functional genomics data as well as multi-omics molecular profiles to drive iterative experimental design decisions.
Work in a highly collaborative environment, tightly embedded in project teams across scientific disciplines and functions, bringing together genetics, chemistry, pharmacology, as well as molecular and cellular biology to accelerate the development of therapeutics.
Survey relevant literature on novel experimental and computational methods and introduce them into in-house portfolio of workflows.
Keep up to date on project-relevant literature (experimental and analytics topics in functional genomics space, specific disease biology, etc) and attend relevant conferences.
Further your professional development by participating in workshops and seminars aimed at personal and professional growth.