SRUC is unique in Scotland and one of the largest organisations of its kind in Europe. Our ambitious and exciting vision is to work at local, national and international levels, leading innovation and sustainable development in agriculture and rural sectors.

This is an opportunity to be a major contributor in a team leading research in animal breeding and genetics and working closely with the livestock industry providing routine genetic/genomic evaluations and decision support tools for farmers. The successful candidate will work within an integrated group of 25 programmers and geneticists, 5 of which work within EGENES.

Our work is varied and interesting ranging from routine evaluations through to researching new phenotypes predicted from milk MIR and developed with Deep Learning. For instance, recently, we succeeded in the use of milk mid-infra red spectral data for Bovine tuberculosis prediction at the industry level, and we are looking for implementing similar strategies for other complex traits as feed intake, among others. We investigate hardware acceleration of compute intensive processes on GPUs and FPGAs and are constantly investigating new and better ways of doing things. Every day is different in EGENES.

We are seeking experienced geneticists who can take a major role in EGENES working closely with the other geneticists (Professor Raph Mrode, Dr Samir Id Lahoucine, Professor Mike Coffey) and the programming team to deliver to deliver efficiently and consistently genetic evaluations of the highest quality. A less experienced geneticist with the right approach and attitude may be considered. It is expected that the candidate will undertake necessary research to underpin practical application of developments in genetic evaluation methodologies including imputation strategies with very large datasets. We work with dairy and beef cattle, sheep, dairy goats, pigs.

The role requires good communication skills as there will be regular client contact for development and testing purposes to ensure the evaluations meets their specification.

Required Skills:

• A post doctorate qualification in quantitative genetics
• Excellent numerical and statistical powers
• Programming experience and the ability to learn new languages
• Good communication ability
• Good analytical/problem solving skills
• Excellent team player skills
• Attention to detail

Desirable Skills:

• SQL Server experience
• FORTRAN
• Scripting
• Large data handling experience
• Genetic evaluation experience

QUALIFICATIONS

Minimum qualification is post-graduate (MSc or PhD) in genetics, animal breeding, bioinformatics, statistics.

Further details on the requirements of this role can be found in the Job Particulars document which you must read before applying for this role.