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At UBC, we believe that attracting and sustaining a diverse workforce is key to the successful pursuit of excellence in research, innovation, and learning for all faculty, staff and students. Our commitment to employment equity helps achieve inclusion and fairness, brings rich diversity to UBC as a workplace, and creates the necessary conditions for a rewarding career. 

Job Summary
The Bioinformatician is responsible for bioinformatics analysis and education/outreach provided by the Life Science Institute (LSI) Bioinformatics Core Facility. The successful applicant will provide bioinformatics advice to multidisciplinary research teams on appropriate research designs and corresponding analyses and provide computational and writing support on research projects. The successful candidate will be responsible for creating and leading bioinformatics workshops delivered to the LSI and UBC community. The ideal candidate is passionate about applied bioinformatics and enjoys building collaborative relationships with diverse groups with varied bioinformatics needs and levels of knowledge.

Organizational Status
The LSI is a UBC Research Institute supported by the UBC faculties of Medicine and Science. The LSI is one of four Global Research Excellence Institutes at UBC. It is home to the research programs of approximately 90 Principal Investigators from three faculties and over 15 departments, who conduct research on a wide variety of life science topics. The successful applicant will report to the Bioinformatics Facility Manager of the Bioinformatics Core Facility, under the guidance of a faculty steering committee, and work closely with Principal Investigators, research staff, and trainees.

Work Performed

Duties include:

- Performing bioinformatics analyses and modeling for multiple research projects using adapted versions of analysis pipelines accounting for the uniqueness of each experiment.

- Providing bioinformatics consultations to the LSI research community.

- Helping to educate/mentor trainees performing their own modeling and analyses with one-on-one sessions.

- Creating and providing bioinformatics workshops covering topics relevant to the LSI research community. It is expected that these educational activities will initially represent an important part of the bioinformatician’s role.

- Keeping an up-to-date working knowledge of the various software tools and new types of omics data being generated by the research community with an emphasis on data generated by the LSI Core Facilities and their multi-omics integration.

- Creating and maintaining analysis pipelines for various types of omics data, including for example variant detection in whole genome sequencing, RNA-Seq, scRNA-Seq, ChIP-seq, denovo assembly, metagenomic sequencing, microarray, mass-spec based proteomics, metabolomics, high-throughput screening, and other emerging omics technologies.

- Integrating multiple omics data types together.

- Performing quality control of the analyzed datasets and clearly communicating the results to the experimentalists.

- Documenting the bioinformatics and statistical methods for inclusion in research publications.

- Facilitating the sharing and standardization of bioinformatics between LSI, UBC and others.

- Helping researchers access and submit their datasets to the relevant public databases.

Consequence of Error/Judgement
The incumbent acts independently and within broad guidelines. The incumbent must exercise initiative and sound judgment in making decisions and planning and executing services and programs.  Must demonstrate tact, sensitivity and confidentiality in dealing with the Bioinformatics Core Facility users. Failure to perform effectively would cause significant loss of support for and credibility from collaborators and senior administration.  Error in judgment determining resources and techniques needed could affect the quality and success of the research projects and credibility of the Bioinformatics Core Facility.

Supervision Received
The successful applicant will work with significant latitude, under broad direction from the Bioinformatics Facility Manager from the LSI Bioinformatics Core Facility.

Supervision Given
Will provide guidance to research personnel using the Bioinformatics Core Facility.

Minimum Qualifications
Post-graduate degree in Statistics. Minimum of three years of related experience in research analysis, or the equivalent combination of education and experience.

- Willingness to respect diverse perspectives, including perspectives in conflict with one’s own

- Demonstrates a commitment to enhancing one’s own awareness, knowledge, and skills related to equity, diversity, and inclusion

Preferred Qualifications

- Graduate degree in bioinformatics or related life sciences discipline, with at least three years of relevant work experience.

- Experience designing and delivering bioinformatics workshops, teaching bioinformatics and mentoring students

- Extensive experience working with the Unix/Linux environment. Experience working in HPC Cluster and Cloud Computing environments is an asset.

- Demonstrated expertise with multiple bioinformatics tools used to process short and long sequencing reads.

- Demonstrated expertise in R and experience with the corresponding bioinformatics packages.

- Programming fluency in a high-level language like Python.

- Familiarity with workflow management systems like Nextflow and Snakemake. Experience with a container platform like Singularity is an asset.

- Functional knowledge of distributed version control systems such as Git is an asset.

- Ability to work both independently and within a team environment.

- Effective oral and written, interpersonal, analytical, and organizational skills.

- Ability to convey concepts and analysis results to non-specialists.

- Knowledge of the various types of data produced by omics experiments and willingness to keep up-to-date in fast moving research fields.

- Experience working on multiple research projects where the candidate was performing the required bioinformatics analyses.

- Bioinformatics and computational skills complementary to the current expertise within the Bioinformatics Core Facility is an asset.