Senior Data Scientist

Build scalable, production ready machine learning and statistical models to improve healthcare data latency through automation. This role will focus on advanced statistical and machine learning solutions collecting, cleansing, interpreting large volumes of data from varying sources, designing and delivering production ready models, monitoring and maintaining models' health in production, all while communicating key findings with stakeholders.

Description:

The Rokita Lab at Children's National Hospital is seeking a highly skilled Senior Bioinformatics Scientist to join our team. We are situated within the Center for Cancer and Immunology Research (CCIR) and Brain Tumor Institute. This position will play a critical role in advancing research focused on uncovering oncogenic mechanisms in pediatric brain tumors and identifying novel therapeutic targets through integrative genomics of host-tumor genome data. The Senior Bioinformatics Scientist will engage in translational research projects and contribute to tool development, such as interactive applications for visualizing complex genomic data data.

The role involves close collaboration with researchers and clinicians within both Children's National as well as external partners. The successful candidate will lead independent bioinformatics-driven projects, mentor junior team members, and contribute to grant applications and scientific manuscripts.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead bioinformatics analyses on pediatric oncology datasets, including genomic, transcriptomic, and epigenomic data.
• Design and implement downstream analytical workflows for high-throughput data using our GitHub, Docker, and AWS infrastructure, focusing on reproducibility, code efficiency, and scalability.
• Collaborate the Open Pediatric Cancer (OpenPedCan) Project.
• Collaborate to identify RNA neoepitope CAR-T or RNA vaccine targets, consisting of proteomic validation.
• Utilize cloud-computing environments (e.g., AWS EC2) and/or high-performance computing (HPC) to support large-scale or memory-intensive analyses.
• Actively and positively participate in sprints and code reviews, ensuring high standards for reproducibility and documentation.
• Engage with multidisciplinary teams, providing bioinformatics expertise to support collaborative research initiatives.

Application Process:

This position will be remote. Candidates should be prepared to share their GitHub handle and present a project as part of the interview process.

Required Qualifications:

• Ph.D. in Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, or a related field, or equivalent industry experience.
• At least five years of experience in bioinformatics, with expertise in Bash, R or Python, RShiny and or Python GUI applications such as streamlit, nicegui, dash, etc.
• Proficiency with cloud-based or high-performance computing environments for bioinformatics workflows.
• Strong experience with tools and best practices for reproducibility, including Git and Docker.
• Proven experience with genomic data types such as single nucleotide variants (SNVs), copy number variants, fusions, RNA expression, methylation, proteomics, and splicing data.
• Commitment to open science practices, including sharing and collaborating on code, data, and documentation.
• Knowledge of pediatric oncology and genomics.

Preferred Skills:

• Strong organizational and project management skills, with the ability to work on multiple projects and teams.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to work in cross-disciplinary teams.
• Eligible to apply for young investigator grant funding.