Bioinformatician

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Note: Applications will be accepted until 11:59 PM on the Posting End Date.

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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 UBC CDC, located at the BCCDC, is hiring a Bioinformatician to support a genomics research project focused on highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses (HPAIVs). The role will support advanced HPAIV genomic analyses, including phylodynamic and phylogeographic analyses that will provide critical insights into HPAIV ecology, evolution, and transmission networks. Working with a team of microbiologists, epidemiologists, veterinarians, senior scientists and technicians at the BCCDC and the Animal Health Centre (AHC), the Bioinformatician supports a wide scope of analytical needs in a One Health Context. This includes but is not limited to pipeline development and deployment, metadata curation, data integration and advanced phylogenetic analyses. Additional responsibilities include liaising with external and internal project team members across public health and animal health disciplines, drafting manuscripts and routine reporting to project funders. The Bioinformatician works as a team player, collaborating and building relationships with medical, clinical and scientific staff as well as with national and international collaborators. This position is grant-funded with a possibility of extension.

Organizational Status
The Bioinformatician will report directly to the study Principal Investigators (PIs) and the Senior Scientists overseeing the genomics analytics portion of the project. They will work collaboratively with other research team members, including research assistants, graduate student trainees, and other research personnel.

Work Performed

• Develop and implement bioinformatics pipelines to support the HPAIV research project, including optimizing and running phylogenetic and phylodynamic models (e.g., BEAST, IQ-TREE, RaXML
• Conduct genomic epidemiology analyses to characterize viral evolution, reassortment, and spillover events, incorporating Bayesian phylogenetics, genome-wide association studies (GWAS), and phylogeographic modeling
• Collaborate with epidemiologists, bioinformaticians, and public health officials to validate genomic tools for real-time outbreak detection and risk monitoring
• Develop and maintain genomic surveillance dashboards for emerging pathogens, integrating metadata, sequencing data, and ecological data
• Compile, curate, and clean large genomic datasets for downstream analyses, ensuring high data quality and reproducibility
• Contribute to knowledge translation by preparing technical reports, manuscripts, and data visualization tools to inform public health and One Health partners
• Interact with external stakeholders, partners and granting agencies; provide assistance in project coordination, data sharing and achieving project milestones
• Follow best practices in computational reproducibility and data security, ensuring compliance with ethical and regulatory standards in public health bioinformatics
• Participate in research meetings to discuss and/or advise on study and protocol development
• Carry out other duties as required
  

Consequence of Error/Judgement
The Bioinformatician is required to conduct all activities in an ethical manner. All procedures or data recorded must be accurate and must accurately reflect the work performed. All activities are accountable to the PIs. As data from this effort will be made widely available to a range of data users for surveillance, epidemiological, and policy research, consequences of error could result in erroneous information with negative implications for all of these activities. Confidentiality of highly personal health information and identifiers present in datasets must be protected at all costs.

Supervision Received
The position will report to the PIs and will work closely with Senior Scientists and other PIs.

Supervision Given
The Bioinformatician will serve a critical role in both the research project and overall strategy of the BCCDC. The Bioinformatician may be responsible for supervising other data management and research team personnel as required.

Minimum Qualifications
Undergraduate degree in a relevant discipline. Minimum of three years of related experience, 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

• Master's degree or Ph.D. in a relevant discipline such as Molecular Biology, Biochemistry, or Genetics, Bioinformatics or computational biology
• Experience with viral genomics preferred (influenza genomics experience is even more preferred)
• Experience analyzing whole-genome sequence (WGS) data
• Proficiency in at least one of: Python (preferred), R, Java, Perl, Shell, and other modern computer languages
• Experience in running WGS analyses on high performance compute clusters
• Experience building phylogenetic trees from WGS data, Next-strain-specific experience preferred
• Experience running phylodynamic models such as BEAST
• Experience using bioinformatic pipeline frameworks e.g., Nextflow (preferred) and SnakeMake
• Excellent ability to communicate effectively both verbally and in writing
• Demonstrated ability to work effectively with others within a team environment
• Demonstrated ability to efficiently organize work assignments and establish priorities
• Excellent time management skills
• Organizational, leadership and interpersonal skills also essential
• Experience contributing to or writing scientific manuscripts preferred