Data Scientist - Environment and Disease Modeling

Syngenta Group•Field, IL

1d•Onsite

About The Position

At Syngenta, our goal is to build the most collaborative and trustworthy team in agriculture, providing top-quality seeds and innovative crop protection solutions that improve farmers' success. To support this mission, Syngenta is seeking a Data Scientist - Environment and Disease Modeling in Field, MN. This role will support the plant epidemiology and disease science within the Temperate Hub R&D organization. This role combines expertise in environmental data analysis, plant disease modeling, and geospatial analytics to advance management across the breeding pipeline. In this role you will build and apply predictive models for environment and disease incidence and severity, link genotypic variation to disease susceptibility, and translate complex biological and environmental signals into actionable insights for breeders and agronomists. The Data Scientist - Environment and Disease Modeling will partner closely with germplasm development teams, pathologists, and global R&D colleagues to deliver disease resistance insights that directly inform selection decisions—both within a season and across multiple years and environments.

Requirements

Master’s or PhD in Plant Pathology, Epidemiology, Quantitative Genetics, Computational Biology, Data Science, or a related field
Strong foundation in plant epidemiology and disease biology, including familiarity with major temperate crop pathogens and their interaction with host genetics and environment
Demonstrated experience with environmental and geospatial data: weather station integration, climate variables, GIS tools, remote sensing products, or spatial interpolation methods
Proficiency in statistical and machine learning modeling, including mixed models, survival analysis, or spatiotemporal models applicable to epidemiological data
Proficient programming skills in R and/or Python.
Familiarity with SQL, version control, and cloud-based development environments

Nice To Haves

Experience with data visualization tools (R Shiny, Tableau, or equivalent) is a plus

Responsibilities

Develop and maintain disease progression models integrating weather, soil, and agronomic data to predict incidence and severity across crops and geographies within season and across years
Integrate environmental and geospatial datasets (climate layers, remote sensing, field location metadata) to characterize biotic and abiotic stress landscapes and support site-based decision making and location management
Compare controlled environment and field data for inoculated trials, partner with pathologists and breeders to curate high-quality datasets for model training and validation, and translate phenotypic disease observations into quantitative traits
Design reproducible, scalable pipelines for data ingestion, QC, modeling, and visualization that can be deployed across the temperate hub breeding programs
Communicate findings and model outputs to scientific and non-scientific stakeholders through clear reports, dashboards, and/or presentations to support data-driven breeding strategy and management decisions
Collaborate with global teams to align environmental and disease modeling methods with broader platform architecture and data standards.