FL84: Head of Computational Biology

Company Summary:

Each day, the lives of more than 2 billion people across the globe are impacted by chronic diseases. Moreover, the economic burden on society of treating chronic disease is spinning out of control. Today, this dire situation appears unlikely to change as >95% of global healthcare costs are spent on treating rather than preventing chronic diseases. FL84, Inc. is a privately held early-stage company that is applying advanced biological and computational platforms to discover breakthroughs in detection of and intervention against the etiologies that drive progression from health to disease. Our goal is to leverage our proprietary platforms to disrupt the current approach of treating chronic disease too late. We endeavor to provide true health care rather than sick care to individuals that are at risk of progressing to disease.

FL84 was founded by Flagship Pioneering, an innovation enterprise dedicated to originating and developing first-in-category life sciences companies. Flagship Pioneering conceives, creates, resources, and develops first-in-category life sciences companies to transform human health and sustainability. Since its launch in 2000, the firm has applied a unique hypothesis-driven innovation process to originate and foster more than 100 scientific ventures, resulting in over $30 billion in aggregate value. The current Flagship ecosystem comprises 37 transformative companies, including: Moderna Therapeutics (NASDAQ: MRNA), Rubius Therapeutics (NASDAQ: RUBY), Indigo Agriculture, and Sana Biotechnology.

Position Summary:

We are seeking a Head of Computational Biology who is enthusiastic about developing, learning and applying computational skills to understand complex biological systems and their relationship to clinical state changes. The candidate will lead a team of scientists to design and implement novel approaches to handling biological data, initially focused on single-cell/nuclei RNAseq but rapidly expanding to multiple types of biological and clinical data.  The role will focus on two main areas: (1) application of machine-learning to uncover novel targets; and (2) pipeline development leveraging external data to contextualize and prioritize targets.  An ideal candidate will pride themselves on their ability to craft scientifically logical and creative stories out of complex data and convert them into executable experiments. The position will provide a unique opportunity to play a foundational role in the development of FL84’s preclinical platform and treat diseases before they become a burden to the patient or the healthcare system.

Key Responsibilities:

• Grow and manage a team of high-caliber computational biologists and bioinformaticists
• Develop and apply bioinformatics, computational biology, and machine learning tools to generate insights and hypotheses from high-dimensional molecular datasets, with an initial focus on time-series snRNA-seq
• Establish pipelines to contextualize and prioritize targets for biological validation
• Ideate on how to align time-series biological data with clinically relevant inflection points identified in electronic health records, clinical trials, or other sources
• Identify and explore internal and external datasets to address questions critical to FL84’s core objectives and generate testable hypotheses
• Develop new data analysis pipelines and integrate with existing machine learning and informatics platforms
• Cultivate a data-centric company philosophy by helping to maintain best practices for code development, data management, and infrastructure
• Monitor and evaluate new and emerging technologies and models and identify opportunities for collaboration within Flagship Pioneering companies, academia, and third parties

Basic Requirements:

• PhD in Computational Biology, Bioengineering, Bioinformatics, or related, with 5+ years biotech industry experience supporting therapeutic programs
• Experience managing computational scientists and instilling strong software best practices.
• Practical programming and scripting skills, preferably in Python
• Motivated and team oriented, with an ability to thrive in an entrepreneurial and multidisciplinary environment
• Excellent communication and presentation skills. Must be able to speak and ideate with multi-disciplinary team including biologists. Must be able to think independently, work collaboratively and contribute to an active intellectual environment

Preferred Requirements:

• Breadth of experience applying deep learning (DL) models to biological data
• Experience with CMAP, LINCS or other perturbagen (e.g., small molecule, CRISPR, etc.) induced transcriptomic databases
• Experience working with reference biological databases and datasets (e.g., TCGA, UK Biobank) is a strong plus
• Familiarity with AWS, GCP, or similar cloud-computing services
• Ability to Google error messages and seek resolution from self-investigation

Flagship Pioneering is committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status.

Recruitment & Staffing Agencies: Flagship Pioneering and its affiliated Flagship Lab companies (collectively, “FSP”) do not accept unsolicited resumes from any source other than candidates. The submission of unsolicited resumes by recruitment or staffing agencies to FSP or its employees is strictly prohibited unless contacted directly by Flagship Pioneering’s internal Talent Acquisition team. Any resume submitted by an agency in the absence of a signed agreement will automatically become the property of FSP, and FSP will not owe any referral or other fees with respect thereto.