Postdoctoral Research Associate

A Computational Biology/Bioinformatics position is available in the Mitreva Lab (https://mitrevalab.wustl.edu) at the Division of Infectious Diseases, Department of Medicine and McDonnell Genome Institute and Washington University School of Medicine. The candidate will be part of an established and successful research group focused on integrating ‘multi-omics’ approaches aimed at understanding diseases at a systems biology level. The position requires working collaboratively with a team of experimental and computational biologists focused on integrating multidimensional biological data to better understand changes in microbiome structure and function in various disease states.

The postdoctoral fellow will work on NIH funded projects focused on understanding how early exposure to social disadvantage, specifically family and neighborhood financial disadvantage in utero and through the first 8 years of life, is a powerful and potentially modifiable environmental determinant of risk for childhood psychopathology. More specifically the focus is on characterizing the gut microbiome profiles in children exposed to prenatal and early life social disadvantage up to 6 years of age and how they correlate with structural and functional brain development.  The candidate will be responsible for leading and carrying out this innovative project that involve shotgun microbiome analysis and will have opportunities to travel and to present at national and international conferences.

Publications reflecting the research portfolio of Mitreva Lab:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?cmd=search&term=mitreva+m+or+mitreva-dautova+m

Preferred Qualifications

• Ability to be outstanding in drive, eagerness, and scientific imagination, and self-motivated. Experience in genomics, metagenomics and bioinformatics. Experience in computational and statistical bioinformatics are particularly encouraged. Familiarity with frequently-used bioinformatic tools for microbiome analysis, such as NGS aligners, QIIME for 16S analysis, clustering algorithms such as NMDS, R packages for alpha and beta diversity measures, tree building to analyze phylogenetic diversity, differential abundance tools such as LEfSe and ANCOM-BC2, metabolic pathway characterization tools such as HUMAnN, etc. Proficient in R and familiarity with other programming languages (Python, Perl, C#) Skilled at effective visualization of high-throughput results (e.g. using programs such as R, GraphPad Prism, MS Excel, Cytoscape, etc) Comfortable working on UNIX/Linux platform

Requested Qualification

• Graduate degree (Ph.D.) in computational biology or a related field Solid background in genomics techniques, computational biology and biostatistics

Washington University School of Medicine (https://medicine.wustl.edu) is one of the two main campuses of Washington University in St. Louis (https://wustl.edu), a private research university founded in 1853. Mitreva Lab is housed in the McDonnell Genome Institute (http://genome.wustl.edu/) which has been at the forefront of genome research since its inception in 1993. We are a world-leader in genomics research as it applies to the study of model organisms and human biology, infections, genetic diseases, and the field of personalized medicine. We provide a value-added biologically and clinically relevant sequence analysis, and foster public understanding of science through various educational and outreach efforts.

Interested candidates should email cover letter, curriculum vitae, summary of their research, two key first author publication and contact information for three recent references to: mmitreva@wustl.edu

Makedonka Mitreva, PhD

Professor of Medicine and of Genetics

Division of Infectious diseases, Department of Internal Medicine

Director, Center for Clinical Genomics of Microbial Systems

Washington University School of Medicine
4444 Forest Park Avenue, St. Louis, MO 63108