Bioinformatician Immunology

Are you an ambitious bioinformatician with a solid background in omics data analysis and experience in the field of immunology and/or infectious disease research? Then this bioinformatician position is the job for you!

Within our Center for Immunology of Infectious diseases and Vaccines we perform research on how vaccinations or infections protect against viruses and bacteria. We investigate the immunity gained after vaccination and/or infection with a special focus on the vulnerable groups in our society such as children and elderly. To this end, the immune mechanisms that protect us against disease caused by human pathogens are investigated. We use multiple "omics" approaches to characterize cellular immune responses in detail, in order to obtain biomarkers or immune profiles that correlate to protection against disease.

What are you going to do?

You will be involved in multiple projects aimed at understanding the immune response to vaccination and infection. You will be responsible for analyzing (multi)-omic (RNA-seq, scRNA-seq, ATAC-seq and TCR-seq) data from clinical studies and in vitro models, and will be integrating the outcomes with other (immunological) data. For this, you design and implement computational pipelines that allows answering specific questions related to immunology of infectious diseases and vaccines, such as identification of potential biomarkers related to immune protection. Within this process you incorporate robust statistical analysis. Finally you will visualize the data into ‘state of the art’ figures. Your role will involve:

• setting up the infrastructure from sequencing platforms to data analysis for multiple omics approaches (RNA-seq, scRNA-seq, ATAC-seq, proteomics, etc.);
• being responsible for the analysis, processing and storage of large datasets conform best practices for ensuring analytical reproducibility;
• performing down-stream data analysis of multi-omic research data (RNA-seq, scRNA-seq, ATAC-seq, proteomics, etc.), to integrate the outcomes with other clinical data, and report findings;
• supporting data analysis for different projects within the department and training others to use basic pipelines
• contribute to academic research publications in collaboration with other team members.

About your team

Your department Immune Mechanisms – Correlate of Protection investigates the immune mechanisms that protect us against disease caused by human pathogens. The research is focused on characterizing cellular immune responses in detail, both the innate arm, as well as the adaptive arm. In various research projects we aim to obtain biomarkers or immune profiles that correlate to protection against disease. You will be part of an enthusiastic team of (senior) scientists, research technicians and data scientists working on immunology. This allows you to work a wide variety of readily available datasets that you will bring together to answer important and relevant public health questions. One of our data scientist, dr. Sara Suarez: "I value the opportunity for exploring diverse topics in vaccine immunology in close collaboration with lab-technicians and scientists responsible for the different projects. Also, I truly enjoy learning and troubleshooting alongside our growing team of talented data scientists and the flexibility to work from home and on-site.”

Unique to this job

We are an international, dynamic, highly motivated team of scientists at different stages of our careers with a strong drive to push research for the benefit of Public Health. We combine expertise in immunology, virology, and bioinformatics and believe in the strength of collaboration and working together as a team.

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Who are you?

• You have a PhD degree in Bioinformatics, System Biology, Computational Biology, Biostatistics, Data Science or a related discipline requiring computational and strong statistical skills.
• Have ample experience with R and/or Python for bioinformatic research.
• Have experience in analyzing transcriptomic, proteomic and epigenomic large data sets, both in bulk and at a single cell level, preferably from studies in the field of immunology, infectious diseases and public health.
• Contribute to an open, stimulating and pleasant working environment and actively participate in scientific discussions.
• Excellent verbal, and written communication skills are essential in this collaborative and multi-disciplinary team environment.