Position Summary The successful Research Associate candidate will join an interdisciplinary group at Michigan State University that applies computational mathematical approaches to Grand Challenges in biology. This position is funded through the National Science Foundation Plant Genome Research Program. The focus of study is large and complex biological datasets, including leaf shapes from across the flowering plants, RNA-seq gene expression data, and empirically determined and predicted protein structures. We will apply techniques from Topological Data Analysis (TDA), such as the Euler Characteristic Transform (ECT) and a graph visualization method called Mapper, to extract information about underlying data structures. Using machine learning applied to topological signatures,