Stillingstittel: PhD Research Fellowship in Bioinformatics

Stillingsbeskrivelse:
The University of Oslo is Norway’s largest institution of research and education with 28 000 students and 7000 employees. Its broad range of academic disciplines and internationally esteemed research communities make UiO an important contributor to society.

A position as PhD Research fellow (postition code 1017) is available at Department of Informatics.

The fellowship will be for a period of 3 years, with no compulsory work or for a period of 4 years, with 25 % compulsory work (teaching responsibilities at the department) contingent on the qualifications of the candidate and the teaching needs of the department. Starting date no later than 1 October 2016. No one can be appointed for more than one fixed-term period at the same institution.

The research fellow will take part in the Centre for Computational Inference in Evolutionary Life Sciences (CELS). CELS is a multidisciplinary centre within life sciences comprising strong research environments in biology and statistical and computational methods for data analysis. CELS addresses fundamental biological questions related to the genotype-phenotype paradigm, how the environment affects genome evolution and development of methods for integrated analysis of genomic and other biotic and abiotic data. A main goal is to develop interdisciplinary research activities generating science of true interest for computer scientists, statisticians and biologists.

Project description:

Metagenomics is the study of the genetic material in a sample containing a mix of different microbial organisms. These samples may have be obtained from such diverse locations as the vertebrate gut (e.g. human or fish), from the depths of the oceans, from the soil somewhere on earth and so forth. Recent advances in DNA sequencing technologies have enabled very large amounts of such data to be obtained for analysis. Extracting biological meaningful information from these huge datasets involve hard computational challenges that can only be solved by good algorithms and efficient parallelization. Interpreting the data correctly can advance science by a better understanding of, for example, the diversity of ecosystems or how the immune system responds to exposure to microorganisms.

We are seeking a highly motivated candidate to develop new or improved algorithms or

tools for metagenomics with improved functionality, accuracy or speed that will be valuable for the scientific community. This is an opportunity to develop open source software in areas like error detection and removal, clustering, searching, classification, genome assembly as well as other areas of metagenomics. We have already contributed with tools like Swarm (http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.593) and VSEARCH. The successful candidate will be embedded in a vibrant bioinformatics environment connected to two Norwegian Centres of Excellence, and have access to first-rate computational infrastructure. The position is associated with the Centre for Computational Inference in Evolutionary Life Science (CELS) at UiO. The CELS research environment offers extensive experience with high-throughput sequencing and assembly of large genomes such as that of Atlantic cod (http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature10342). The candidate will be supervised by an interdisciplinary team of scientists and will collaborate with other PhD research fellows within CELS.

Requirements:

The Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences has a strategic ambition of being a leading research faculty. Candidates for these fellowships will be selected in accordance with this, and expected to be in the upper segment of their class with respect to academic credentials.

Applicants must hold a Master's degree or equivalent in bioinformatics or computer science, and need to document good software development skills.

The candidate would need to learn genomics/metagenomics during the project, but

Minstelønn: 0

Maksimal lønn: 0

Arbeidsgiver Navn: Universitetet i Oslo, Department of Info

Arbeidsgiver adresse: 0313 OSLO

Job kort beskrivelse: Electronics engineers

Land: Norge

Region: Oslo

Kilde til jobbtilbud: NAV, Offentlige arbeidsformidlinger, Norge

Lønn valuta: NOK

Lønn periode: Pr. år