Career Center

The Research Informatics Solutions (RIS) group within the University of Minnesota Supercomputing Institute (MSI) is hiring two full-time Bioinformatics Analysts to support basic biomedical and applied clinical genetic research for the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology (LM&P) at the University of Minnesota. The analysts in these positions will conduct cutting-edge bioinformatics analyses in close collaboration with a diverse set of biomedical labs within the LM&P department, as well as design and implement clinical genomic analysis pipelines for the Molecular Diagnostic Lab. Successful candidates will join the five-person RIS-LM&P group, a subset of the twelve-person RIS group at MSI.

We work with researchers and clinicians in LM&P on a broad variety of projects that will impact human health, including cancer, immunology, neurology, and epidemiology. A rapidly growing portion of these projects involves single-cell sequencing and spatial transcriptomics, so there is ample opportunity for our group to break new ground by exploring novel methods and tools.

MSI and LM&P have a strong commitment to the University’s goal of creating a positive and inclusive campus climate by advancing equity and diversity. We aim to hire high-potential people with varying identities and backgrounds. Analysts in these positions must have excellent communication skills, strong analytical, computational, and life sciences training or experience, and be comfortable working independently and as part of an interdisciplinary research team on diverse projects.

As part of an interdisciplinary team, successful candidates will have the responsibilities to:

• Serve as a bioinformatics analyst and developer for research and clinical projects for LM&P.
• Consult with LM&P researchers on experimental design and planning.
• Design and implement appropriate informatics workflows.
• Identify and integrate new, cutting-edge molecular technologies and analysis methods as they become useful for research and/or clinical purposes (e.g., single-cell expression profiling, long-read sequencing, spatial transcriptomics, etc.)
• Appropriately document and present methods and results in both internal and external reports, publications, and presentations.

The ideal candidates will have advanced knowledge of next generation sequencing technologies with demonstrated practical experience in developing and carrying out analytical strategies in the context of NGS applications (e.g. RNA-seq, DNA SNP and structural variant detection, de novo sequence assembly, etc.).

Required Qualifications

• Doctorate in the life sciences, computer science or engineering. Candidates must have significant bioinformatics experience.
• 3+ years of research experience in genomics, genetics, molecular biology or computational biology. 
• Hands-on experience in developing and carrying out data analytical strategies and pipelines for analyzing datasets from high-throughput platforms such as next generation sequencing.
• Experience/general proficiency with UNIX shell environment, a programming language (ideally R or python), plus currently used tools (e.g. BWA, HISAT2, GATK, freebayes, Cell Ranger, Seurat, etc.).
• Must be able to understand and translate life scientist researchers' scientific goals into analytical strategies and process requirements.
• Must be able to function as part of an interactive team while demonstrating self-initiative to achieve the project's goals and the group's mission.
• Critical and independent thinking.
• Excellent oral and written English communication and interpersonal skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Research background in human or mammalian genetics is strongly preferred.
• Image analysis skills, particularly image segmentation, are highly desirable.
• Advanced statistical and data modeling skills.