Research Assistant/Research Associate in Biosecurity

 

Salary:

Research Assistant: £31,396 to £32,982 per annum

Research Associate: £33,966 to £44,263 per annum

 

Newcastle University is a great place to work, with excellent benefits. We have a generous holiday package; plus the opportunity to buy more, great pension schemes and a number of health and wellbeing initiatives to support you.

 

Closing Date: 16 June 2024

 

 

The role

 

The Environmental Biotechnology Innovation Centre (EBIC), which ICOS is a member, brings together scientists from ten leading UK institutions in a mission to engineer the properties and functions of micro-organisms, creating more effective ways to monitor the environment and remove pollutants. The Cyanobacteria Engineering for Restoring Environments (CYBER) project aims to develop the foundational multidisciplinary tools needed to de-risk environmentally focused engineering biology and ultimately support its future deployment into real-world ecosystems.

 

We are looking for candidates with a background in microbial (and ideally plants) bioinformatics. It is important that you are familiar with microbial genetics, genomics technologies data sets preparation, analysis, and pre/post-processing of data.  You should have experience assembling, annotating, and analysing microbial genomes and metagenomes.  Also experience in setting up bioinformatics workflows in on-site computing resources as well as on the cloud would be ideal. 

 

Your role will be to analyse microbial genomes (or metagenomes).  You will identify and annotate coding regions, ORFs, regulatory regions and intergenic sections using available information to develop new algorithms and databases when needed. You will have the opportunity to use your skills to improve the traceability of engineered cells and plasmids and their biosecurity.

 

You will have regular liaison with the other investigators in the projects and the research group, as well as international collaborators.  It is important that you keep excellent records of all the activities to deliver the project milestones and retain valuable information to be able to reuse and communicate withing the team.

 

To have a conversation about the opportunity, please contact Professor Natalio Krasnogor at Natalio.Krasnogor@newcastle.ac.uk

 

This role is fixed term for a period of 24 months.

 

To apply, please upload a CV and letter of application which outlines how your skills, experiences and knowledge align with the person specification below.

 

Interviews will be held on 5th July 2024.

Key Accountabilities

●    Improve the traceability of engineered cells in natural environments by designing and synthetizing robust genomic barcodes & watermarks and use sequencing technology to track cells in complex environments and ensure their long-term trustworthiness
●    Design, specify and implement bioinformatics software, pipelines and workflows to underpin our projects biosecurity including the automated identification of neutral sites for barcode/watermark insertion
●    Automate the determination, annotation and analysis of microbial strain sequences (e.g. 16s rRNA gene sequencing, whole genome sequencing, metagenome sequencing, transcriptome sequencing, plasmids sequencing, etc) and integrate into bioinformatics workflows
●    Integrate genome, metagenome and plasmid sequences comparison into workflows (e.g. with OGRIs, ANI, dDDH, etc)
In addition, for Research Associate
●    Design genetically engineered biocontainment strategies for engineered microbial species
●    Develop AI technologies for enhancing biosecurity and/or biocontainment aspects of DNA sequencing and synthesis as well as engineered cells and plasmids traceability
●    Integrate the above into the CellRepo platform technology stack to maintain ICOS and its various projects cell lines & plasmids catalogue
●    Contribute to grant writing
●    Support our group's social scientist with regards to Responsible Research and Innovation. Contributing also to the public communication of ICOS activities

 

The Person 

 

Knowledge, Skills and Experience 

•    Knowledge of plant microbial bioinformatics
•    Understanding of microbial genetics
•    Experience of integrating diverse sources of information and data to achieve accurate results
•    Experience in genomics and transcriptomics technologies and bioinformatics
•    Demonstrable expertise in programming including Ruby, Python, Java(script) or C/ C++.
•    Competence in Linux or OS X programming environments
•    Understanding of software engineering good practices (e.g. version control, testing, documentation, debugging, etc)
•    Experience in developing web applications (front-end, back-end or both) for bioinformatics or engineering/synthetic biology

 

In addition, essential for Research Associate
•    Publication of work in relevant peer-reviewed conferences and/or journals
•    Presentation of work at scientific meetings
•    Experience in the utilisation and development of social media for public dissemination and outreach

Desirable 
•    Experience applying artificial intelligence to bioinformatics problems (e.g. DNA motif discovery/genome annotation)
•    Demonstrable application of bioinformatics expertise to biosecurity problems
•    Molecular biology, Synthetic Biology or Biotechnology laboratory experience
•    AI experience

 

Attributes and Behaviour

•    An independent, resourceful, reliable, team player
•    An ability to communicate effectively via oral and written media (e.g. technical reports, papers, presentations)
•    Capacity for original thought
•    Ability to interact with people from different disciplines
•    Punctual and dependable, showing commitment to the role and wider school
•    Ability to deliver results to tight deadlines

 

Qualifications

•    An undergraduate and masters degree in computer science, engineering, mathematics, bioinformatics or closely related fields (Research Assistant)
•    A PhD degree in bioinformatics, biosecurity, synthetic biology or very closely related field (Research Associate)
 

Newcastle University is a global University where everyone is treated with dignity and respect.  As a University of Sanctuary, we aim to provide a welcoming place of safety for all, offering opportunities to people fleeing violence and persecution.

 

We are committed to being a fully inclusive university which actively recruits, supports and retains colleagues from all sectors of society.  We value diversity as well as celebrate, support and thrive on the contributions of all of our employees and the communities they represent.  We are proud to be an equal opportunities employer and encourage applications from individuals who can complement our existing teams, we believe that success is built on having teams whose backgrounds and experiences reflect the diversity of our university and student population.

 

At Newcastle University we hold a silver Athena Swan award in recognition of our good employment practices for the advancement of gender equality.  We also hold a Race Equality Charter Bronze award in recognition of our work towards tackling race inequality in higher education REC.  We are a Disability Confident employer and will offer an interview to disabled applicants who meet the essential criteria for the role as part of the offer and interview scheme.

 

In addition, we are a member of the Euraxess initiative supporting researchers in Europe. 

Requisition ID: 27112