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Postdoctoral Associate, Center for Biomedical Innovation

Employer
MIT MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
Location
Massachusetts, United States
Closing date
21 Mar 2021

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Working at MIT offers opportunities, an environment, a culture – and benefits – that just aren’t found together anywhere else. If you’re curious, motivated, want to be part of a unique community, and help shape the future – then take a look at this opportunity.

POSTDOCTORAL ASSOCIATE, Center for Biomedical Innovation (CBI), to explore the use of high-throughput sequencing and bioinformatic analysis for rapid and sensitive safety screening. As part of the production of protein and cell-based therapeutics, there is a requirement to ensure that the product is free of adventitious agents. Rapid PCR tests for adventitious agents have previously been demonstrated to prevent the spread of a contaminant through a manufacturing facility. However, existing tests are either targeted (e.g., PCR) or too slow for rapid decisions making. Further, cell therapy products have limited shelf-lives and the patients are in critical need of rapid treatment. Thus, there is a vital need for methods that can rapidly and reliably assess products for contamination and do so with high sensitivity and speed.  Will work on the development of novel bioinformatic pipelines for rapid adventitious agent detection, develop targeted adventitious agent sequencing databases, perform in silico experiments to evaluate bioinformatic approaches, develop novel sequencing approaches using state-of-the-art sequencers (e.g., Oxford Nanopore MinION), and evaluate the capability of these approaches compared to current state of the art.

Job Requirements

REQUIRED:  Ph.D. in computational biology, bioinformatics, human genomics, or related biological data sciences field; interdisciplinary bioinformatics research experience; excellent skills and abilities in bioinformatics, data curation, large scale data and NGS analysis, and statistics and statistical model building as evidenced by publications and presentations; knowledge of current bioinformatics trends, public genomic tools, databases, and utilities, with a focus on next generation sequencing and genome annotation; excellent time-management, organizational, and verbal and written English communication skills; and ability to work both independently and collaboratively.  Experience working with virus databases preferred.  

This is a one-year appointment with the possibility of renewal for a second year based upon satisfactory performance.

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