Current vacancies

Advanced Research Assistant - Malaria parasite lifecycle

Salary in the region of £26,960 - £32,622 (dependent on experience) plus excellent benefits

Fixed term until May 2021

We are seeking a highly motivated and flexible Advanced Research Assistant to join the PlasmoGEM team to work on the biology of the malaria parasite and to help identify new potential drug targets. The post holder’s main responsibilities will be the execution of day-to-day workflows of projects for the generation and maintenance of rodent malaria parasites (P. berghei) which requires both work with rodents as well as mosquitoes. The most challenging aspects of this role will be to independently organise and run the insectary facility and ensure that all day-to-day tasks are carried out in an independent and efficient manner to maintain the malaria parasite life cycle. Good organisation skills and the ability to perform and track a variety of challenging projects is essential. Past experience in working with rodents or managing an insectary would be advantageous. The successful candidate must be able to work as part of a team and also have the ability to independently handle complex workflows from project start to delivery. Good communication/record keeping skills are a key part of the role.

PlasmoGEM (PlasmodiumGenetic Modification) develops, produces and distributes free reagents for the genetic manipulation of malaria parasites at scale. We perform large-scale genetic screens in different Plasmodiumspecies, such as Plasmodium berghei, Plasmodium knowlesi and Plasmodium falciparum, to uncover new parasite biology and identify possible therapeutic targets. 

Some weekend work is anticipated in this role. 

Reference:83575

Advanced Research Assistant - Transgenic Technician

Salary range £27,030 to £32,707 per annum plus benefits 

Fixed term contract until 30^th September 2021

The Sanger Mouse Pipelines mouse production team is looking to recruit an enthusiastic and skilled Advanced Research Assistant with experience in transgenic mouse production and archiving techniques.

Your day to day activities will include mouse production of mouse mutants by both ES cell and Crispr based microinjections into mouse preimplantation stage embryos and cryopreservation of mutant lines generated for distribution to the wider scientific community.You will also require the use of surgical techniques in uterine and oviducal embryo transfer and vasectomy used for the production of pseudopregnant females. The post holder would also be tasked with the quality control of the cryopreserved resource using IVF.

In addition to contributing to the Sanger Mouse Pipelines mouse production you will provide mouse production and cryopreservation for Sanger faculty members as well as rederivation and cryopreservation for external customers. You will need to have a flexible working attitude and good communication and team working skills to help manage conflicting priorities of the pipeline but still meet demanding targets.  All activities will require meticulous record keeping and high attention to detail whilst at all times having full regard to animal welfare and the 3R’s ethos.

Reference:83560

Associate Faculty Positions in Global Pathogen Surveillance

The Wellcome Sanger Institute is seeking exceptional scientists to help develop its scientific portfolio in global pathogen surveillance, as part of the Sanger Associate Faculty programme.

The Institute is an internationally renowned genome research centre with approximately 36 core faculty teams http://www.sanger.ac.uk/people/category/faculty and 1,100 employees based south of Cambridge. Our mission is to use genome sequences to advance understanding of the biology of humans and pathogens in order to improve human health. With core infrastructure for large-scale genome research, we enable our researchers to concentrate on biological questions across a diverse range of genomic science. The result is a unique, vibrant and interactive research environment with synergies and cross-fertilisation of ideas, and many international collaborations.

These new Associate Faculty positions will be linked to the Parasites and Microbes Programme (https://www.sanger.ac.uk/science/programmes/parasites-and-microbes ) which is expanding its research on the evolutionary dynamics of infectious disease.   Our goal is to chart the evolutionary trajectory of important pathogen and vector species by genomic analysis of longitudinally collected samples at multiple locations around the world, in collaboration with a large international network of researchers and disease control programmes.  We welcome candidates who will develop new ways to translate genomic data into decision support tools that will enable national and international public health agencies to control and eventually eliminate major endemic diseases of the developing world.

We would particularly welcome applicants with expertise in mathematical and computational aspects of pathogen and vector genomic surveillance, including integration of genomic data with other data sources to model transmission dynamics and the evolution of resistance, and developing decision support algorithms for disease control interventions.  We would also welcome applicants who have held senior positions in disease control programmes or international policy bodies, and who have developed expertise in building, commissioning or using surveillance tools to guide or monitor disease control interventions.

The successful candidates will not be employed by the Institute, but will be expected to spend between 10-20% of their time focused on the development of their Sanger research programme, contributing to the scientific life of the Institute.  Associate Faculty positions are accompanied with start-up funding to establish a small, independent team, engaged in research that cannot be conducted at their home organisation and enhanced by the Institute’s platforms, systems, and infrastructure.  Associate Faculty will be expected to secure third party funding to support their research endeavour.

Associate Faculty Requirements

• Associated with an institute of higher learning or research centre
• Able to devote time to developing a research programme at Sanger

Reference:83555

Contracts Manager

Competitive salary and benefits package 

An opportunity has arisen in our Legal, Ethics and Governance office. We are seeking an enthusiastic and experienced Contracts Manager to join our close-knit and busy team.

The role is varied and you will have the opportunity to engage with a wide variety of scientists, research administrators and collaborators in order support the excellent science taking place at the Wellcome Sanger Institute.

You will be responsible for reviewing and negotiating the terms and conditions of a diverse range of research contracts and agreements, identifying and mitigating risks to ensure that they do not expose the Wellcome Sanger Institute to unreasonable risk and to ensure that they comply with current legislation, and internal policies and procedures.

You will be a strong communicator, have a flexible approach, with the ability to prioritise a busy workload. You will enjoy dealing with complex scenarios and be solution focused.

We appreciate the importance of achieving work-life balance and support this with a number of family-friendly policies and benefits including a flexible working policy for those who may wish to apply to amend their working pattern or arrangement

Reference:83567

Gardener

Salary range £19,500 per annum plus benefits 

We are looking for a full time gardener to work within our Grounds team. This is an ideal opportunity if you are wanting to continue to develop a career with the horticulture industry.

You will be working ‘hands on’ with a team of gardeners to provide a top class horticultural environment – carrying out tasks such as weeding, planting, grass cutting, pruning, leaf clearing and gritting

You will be able to show some or all of the following:

• Has experience of grounds maintenance on similar sites
• Has NPTC PA1 and PA6 spraying certificates not essential but will enhance your application)
• Has experience of using a variety of grounds maintenance machinery
• Is able to show the ability to plan and organise their daily taks
• Is adaptable
• Able to follow health and safety instructions and have an awareness of these
• Holds a full driving licence
• Enjoys working as part of a team but can also work alone

The Wellcome Genome Campus covers 155 acres of award winning landscape areas.  The campus plays host to scientific research, courses, conferences and, has a publicly accessible nature reserve. 

Reference:83570

Laboratory Equipment Repair Team Leader

Salary range £33,993 to £41,547 per annum, plus benefits

We have a new opportunity in our team for a motivated individual to provide technical leadership for our laboratory equipment repair team.

You will lead a small team of technicians providing front line maintenance of laboratory equipment and calibration of pipettes. As team leader you will report to the Technical Services Manager and operate within the Scientific Facilities Team at the Genome Campus. As part of this role you will be using of a number of campus IT systems including asset management databases and electronic permit to work systems.

You will have significant experience in a laboratory environment and equipment as well as some background in equipment calibration. 

Reference:83498

Medical Statistician - Health Data Research UK

Salary range: £36,737 to £44,451pa plus excellent benefits

Fixed-term: 3 years

We seek an experience Medical Statistician to analyse high-dimensional data arising from the integration of molecular, genomic and imaging data with clinical information from electronic health records to identify causal risk factors associated with a range of diseases. The post-holder will have access to rich, unique datasets from multiple population and patient cohorts, which include genetic, multi-omic and EHR data.

Candidates should have: i) a Masters or PhD in Statistics or another relevant subject; ii) strong statistical/quantitative skills and knowledge of high-dimensional statistical methods (eg. LASSO, ridge regression); iii) excellent statistical programming skills (e.g. Stata, R); iv) high-level report writing and presentation skills and; v) excellent verbal and written communication skills.

Health Data Research UK is the new national institute for data science for health, which is being established in 2018 with long term (10 year+) funding support from research councils, UKRI, charitable and governmental research funders. The mission of HDR UK is to drive improvements in the health tripartite of patients and populations through research at regional and national scale. To deliver this mission, the Wellcome Sanger Institute (WSI), EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), and the University of Cambridge (UoC) and its associated hospitals came together as the HDR Cambridge partnership.

Health Data Research UK is funded by UK Research and Innovation, Department of Health (England) and the UK devolved administrations, and leading medical research charities.

Reference:83562

Postdoctoral Fellow - Experimental Data Generation

Salary range £31,897 - £39,240 (dependent on experience) plus excellent benefits

Fixed term for 3 years

A position is now available for a highly motivated Postdoctoral Fellow to join the research group of Dr. Ana Cvejic, Dr Peter Campbell and Open Targets partners at the Wellcome Sanger Institute (WSI). 

Open Targets aims to provide evidence on the biological validity of therapeutic targets and provide an initial assessment of the likely effectiveness of pharmacological intervention on these targets, using genome-scale experiments and analysis. This pioneering public-private partnership between Sanofi, Celgene, EMBL-EBI, GlaxoSmithKline, Takeda, and the Wellcome Sanger Institute, aims to provide a R&D framework that applies to all aspects of human disease, and to share its data openly with the scientific community (http://www.opentargets.org).

The project will combine state-of-the-art single-cell experimental data generation with computational analysis using novel methods to reveal the full spectrum of transcriptional and epigenetic changes that are associated with myeloid progenitors’ migration and differentiation at the tumour sites.

You will have a PhD with significant experience in molecular and cell biology. Experience in CRISPR screening will be highly desirable. Knowledge or interest in the field of haematology, cancer biology and inflammation would be highly advantageous. You will be able to demonstrate independent, critical thinking, will be passionate about science, and keen to learn and improve skills in an outstanding research environment.

Reference:83551

Postdoctoral Fellow - Functional Genomics

Salary range £31,897 - £39,240 (dependent on experience) plus excellent benefits

Fixed term for 3 years

We are looking to appoint a computational postdoctoral fellow in functional genomics to work with Emma Davenport and Gosia Trynka’s groups at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. This project is particularly suitable for a candidate with a mix of experimental and computational expertise and an ambition to dive into the analysis of a large single cell dataset.

Genome-wide associations studies (GWAS) have transformed our understanding of the genetic basis of autoimmunity, and have identified hundreds of genetic variants that confer disease susceptibility. However, the mechanisms by which most of these variants drive disease risk remain unclear, and the challenge of linking disease-associated variants to a causal mechanisms has limited the translational value of GWAS for drug development.

As part of an interdisciplinary team of experimentalists, clinical and industry collaborators you will lead an exciting project to map expression quantitative trait loci using large scale single cell RNA-seq data generated from 500 healthy and immune disease patients (sceQTLs).  This is an excellent opportunity to be engaged in all aspects of a large-scale project, from planning and data generation through to analysis and novel discovery. Our goal is to accelerate drug discovery by integrating immune disease GWAS variants with the sceQTLs maps generated in this project to identify the most promising therapeutic targets for follow up by the industry partners working closely with us. This project forms part of the collaboration with Open Targets (https://www.opentargets.org/) and provides a great opportunity to deliver real translational solutions working at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, with industry partners including GSK, Celgene, Sanofi, Takeda and Biogen.

Reference:83546

Postdoctoral Fellow - Single cell genomics of disease

Salary range: £31,897-£39,986 per annum depending on experience plus excellent benefits.

Fixed Term Contract for 3 Years.

Applications are invited for a 3-year Postdoctoral Fellowship within the Genomics of Inflammation and Immunity group at the Wellcome Sanger Institute (WSI), headed by Dr. Carl Anderson (www.andersonlab.info). Our group uses large-scale genetic and genomic data to understand the biological basis of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) risk and progression. The ultimate goal of our IBD research is to identify new drug targets for the disease, and ascertain which individuals should be prescribed a given drug.

We have been awarded funding from the Crohn’s Colitis Foundation (CCF) to generate single-cell transcriptomic data from intestinal biopsies obtained from 160 IBD patients undergoing colonoscopy. All individuals will also be genotyped, with the goal of combining these datasets to map eQTLs across the more than forty different cell-types in the inflamed gut. The results from these analyses will then be combined with our detailed maps of IBD risk loci (and other gastrointestinal diseases) to identify genes that are dysregulated to bring about disease. The ultimate goal of the research is thus to improve our basic knowledge of IBD pathogenesis and identify novel candidate drug targets for treating disease.

You will use your established expertise in single-cell genomics and/or QTL mapping to lead the analysis and ensure that the project delivers on its ambitious goals. You will take intellectual ownership of the project and think broadly about questions that can be addressed using the data. You will collaborate closely with other members of the Anderson Lab working on a similar project to build a single-cell derived map of gut eQTLs from biopsies ascertained from 300 healthy individuals. As such, this project will suit a self-motivated individual with good communication skills who is looking to make a personal contribution to genomic research.

Reference:83557

Project Manager

Salary range up to £50,000 per annum plus benefits

Full time, part time and flexible working will be considered (Full time 37 hours per week/Part time minimum of 30 hours)

We have an opportunity for a project manager to join our central team managing cross-functional strategic projects and providing PMO support for change across the Sanger Institute.

The first exciting challenge for you in this role is to support the establishment of a new Research Tissue Bank within Scientific Operations, to coordinate the collection, storage and distribution of ethically approved tissue for a wide variety of projects, with a sample import, export and archive service.

The various work streams that need project management support include team set up, process design, sample management systems and the launch of new services for the Research Programmes. 

You will identify process and operational issues, work with people to define a better way of working and help them implement the change. You will be responsible for end to end project management and delivering sustainable change, involving successful planning, collaborating, reporting and implementation.

The Sanger Institute is committed to delivering life-changing science with the reach, scale, and imagination to solve some of humanity's greatest challenges, and is based at the Wellcome Genome Campus, home to some of the world's foremost institutes and organisations in genomics and computational biology.

Reference:83573

Senior Bioinformatician/ Genomics Data Scientist - Tree of Life Genomics

Salary in the region of £36,737- £44,451 (dependent on experience) plus excellent benefits

Fixed term for 2 years - with potential to extend for 3 years

The Sanger Institute with other partners has launched the Darwin Tree of Life project to provide high quality genome assemblies for all eukaryotic species in the British Isles. This project will significantly contribute to the global Earth Biogenome Project, fundamentally changing scientific knowledge of evolution and interactions among millions of the planet’s organisms. 

We are seeking two talented bioinformaticians or genomics data scientists to contribute to genome assembly, data analysis and the development of methods and software to support the Darwin Tree of Life project. Sequencing technologies are constantly evolving in terms of the type and volume of the sequence data they produce. The recent progress in long-read sequencing technologies means that we are now beginning to be able to consistently deliver high quality genome assemblies for species that did not previously have such a resource. There are opportunities and challenges to design scalable and robust informatics solutions for the data tracking, storage, and analysis of this data. One of the most challenging aspects of this role will be to produce high-quality scientific results on a large scale while adapting to rapid developments in sequencing technology and software.

The primary responsibilities of the successful applicants will be: 

• To develop, maintain, and run pipelines and processes for the processing, QC, and analysis of high-throughput sequencing data.
• To evaluate and compare new tools and technologies such as new assembly programs or tools for inclusion in the pipeline.
• To develop and maintain a system for tracking data sets and their analysis progress against team projects.
• To participate in the development of novel bioinformatics software tools and techniques for high-throughput sequencing and assembly.
• To contribute to scientific publications.
• To help to make our data and resources available to a large community of biologists and geneticists.

These roles would suit somebody with some previous experience with bioinformatics or other large scale scientific data analysis, or a newly qualified graduate student with data science skills interested in DNA sequence data. While desirable, previous experience with DNA sequencing data is not strictly necessary for the position. We have a strong publication record and culture of producing open data resources and open source software development. This role requires an investigative and solution-oriented mind set and excellent communication skills to work effectively within large national and international consortia.

For further information or questions about this post please contact Shane McCarthy (sm15@sanger.ac.uk)

Reference:83533

Senior Health & Safety Adviser/Manager

Salary range £43,917 to £53,140 per annum plus benefits

The Wellcome Genome Campus, in the heart of the Cambridgeshire countryside, provides a unique and beautiful working environment with an impressive range of services and facilities.  We pride ourselves on taking care of all our staff, providing a competitive and comprehensive range of benefits for you and your family, to compliment your lifestyle.

We appreciate the importance of achieving work-life balance and support this with a number of family-friendly benefits including a flexible working policy for those who may wish to apply to amend their working pattern or arrangement.

An opportunity has arisen within the Campus Health and Safety team who work in collaboration with managers and their teams across the Campus for the continuous improvement of health and safety standards.  

About the role:  

As a Senior Health & Safety Adviser/Manager you will have proven experience, ideally from working in a scientific laboratory environment, with the passion and necessary professional development for supporting managers with their health and safety responsibilities.  Managing a small team and taking a hands-on approach, together you will drive the ergonomic / wellbeing and chemical health and safety programmes, whilst working closely with the biological and facility health and safety adviser team members.  Given the diverse nature of the Campus you will have responsibility for a wide range of proactive activities, such as developing and delivering training, inspections and engagement, as well as complex and routine health and safety casework, including the investigation of events and occupational health concerns.  Other relevant expertise therefore is highly desirable. 

Reference:83565

Senior Research Assistant - Cellular Generation and Phenotyping

Salary in the region of £33,935 to £41,062 (dependent on experience) plus excellent benefits.

An exciting opportunity has arisen for a Senior Research Assistant to support the Cellular Generation and Phenotyping team (CGaP) here at the Sanger.

The Opportunity

You will join a multi-disciplinary team working collaboratively in delivering a project involving differentiation of iPSC into neural progenitor cells. Additionally, you may also be involved in projects deriving iPSC from skin and blood samples. Overtime there will also be scope for you to move between diverse projects we run here at CGaP.

Working with a team of enthusiastic and highly motivated Research Assistants, you will provide support to the team, inspiring, developing and mentoring junior staff.  Excellent communication and relationship-building skills alongside strong time management and organisational skills are needed in abundance, as is the ability to troubleshoot and identify areas for process improvement.

Team ethos

As a team we work together to successfully deliver large-scale projects, building a culture of respect, cohesiveness and continuous process improvements. We encourage all staff to take part the learning and development opportunities available at the Institute as well as department and institute wide initiatives.

More about CGaP and the department’s portfolio of projects:

We are a core facility, responsible for providing cell biology resource and expertise to the wider institute. We do this by running multiple, diverse, high throughput projects for various faculty teams from across the Sanger Institute. Our current portfolio of projects include, iPSC derivation and differentiation toward myeloid and neuronal lineages, genome wide CRISPR screens, organoid derivation, the Human Cell Atlas Initiative and the generation of Plasmodium mutants as well as work with various species of the pathogen Klebsiella.

Application Process

Please apply online and include a covering letter with your application describing how you meet the essential criteria for the role.

Reference:83574

Senior Software Developer - Ruby, JavaScript, Java, Python, SQL and noSQL tech

Salary in the region of £41,000 to £45,000 per annum plus benefits

We are seeking two senior software developers with empathy and curiosity to design and craft software that enables the delivery of globally significant research at scale.

What we can offer:

Genuine job satisfaction supporting large teams of scientists at one of the world’s leading research centres delivering extraordinary improvements in human and animal health.

Team work with senior and junior developers coding in Ruby, JavaScript (including React/Vue), Java, Python, SQL and noSQL technologies deployed to Linux (typically Ubuntu). We develop on Macintosh typically but you are free to choose Linux or Windows.

The opportunity to craft enterprise technical solutions with virtualisation, web services and message bus technologies (OpenStack, VMware, Rabbit MQ) in an open source culture 

Professional growth and development through a dedicated training budget and exposure to all elements of the development life cycle managed using Scrum.

Space to explore your long-term opportunities through our trained coaches and mentors program.

To be part of a diverse group of over 300 on-site developers helping to build great technologies to support Wellcome Trust 25 year vision for the campus.

A comfortable working environment with an informal dress code, a company social calendar and modern offices set in the 55-acre grounds of Hinxton Hall and associated wetland reserve ten miles to the south of the charming city of Cambridge.

To find out more about what life as a software developer at Sanger looks like take a look at our a day in a life article. For additional information please see job description. 

What’s not essential:

A long publication record, a background in biology or a deep understanding of genomics or cellular culture. You will begin to understand the domain through regular contact with laboratory scientists, their managers and bioinformaticians, our customers. This process starts in your first week and requires a curious mind to understand the changing nature of the work at Sanger.

We appreciate the importance of achieving work-life balance for all our employees and support this with a a flexible working policy for those who may wish to apply to amend their working pattern and have family-friendly policies 

We will consider application from full and part time candidates equally. Full time hours 37 per week/Part time up to 30 hours per week.

Reference:83547

Senior Software Developer - Tree of Life Genomics

Salary in the region of £41,259 - £49,922 (dependent on experience) plus excellent benefits

Fixed term for 2 years - with potential to extend for 3 years

The Sanger Institute with other partners has launched the Darwin Tree of Life project to provide high-quality genome assemblies for all eukaryotic species in the British Isles. This project will significantly contribute to the global Earth Biogenome Project, fundamentally changing scientific knowledge of evolution and interactions among millions of the planet’s organisms. 

We are seeking a senior software developer to contribute to building and optimising the computational infrastructure required to scale genome assembly within this project, streamlining the processing of terabytes of raw data. This will build on Sanger's world-class computational resources, including an OpenStack private cloud environment, a 15000+ core computational cluster and many petabytes of high-speed distributed file systems and object stores. 

The primary responsibilities of the successful applicants will be: 

• To write high quality, documented code, in coordination with other team members, in order to facilitate the rapid production and analysis of genome assemblies. Develop systems to perform essential quality checks of the data prior to release, to identify errors and ensure a high level of accuracy is maintained.
• Work with team members to build, maintain and run robust pipelines for building these assemblies. Pipelines must scale as more species are sequenced and be adaptable to rapid developments in sequencing technologies and software.
• To work with core IT on systems configuration, packaging and monitoring to support these processes.
• To participate in the agreement of achievable timelines for programming and development projects and to subsequently meet those goals.
• Initiate and contribute to problem-solving discussions with the team to generate novel ideas and help the project move forward.
• Contribute directly to the delivery of the Darwin Project by working with various internal and external groups to discuss and understand their analysis needs to enable them to work more quickly and more accurately.
• Study existing solutions and make recommendations to team leader and faculty groups for improvements.

Team members will be expected to work independently at a technical level, while collaborating closely with colleagues on systems development, and to be comfortable communicating directly with scientific researchers regarding analysis requirements. Recent graduates are also encouraged to apply, although it is strongly desirable that any candidate has substantial development experience outside of coursework (e.g. work experience, participation in open source projects). Bioinformatic/biological knowledge is not essential for this role, but an interest in the science on campus and desire to learn bioinformatic concepts is important. 

For further information or questions about this post please contact Shane McCarthy (sm15@sanger.ac.uk)

Reference:83540

Senior Software Developer and Systems Administrator - Fixed Term Contract

Salary up to £41,974 per annum plus benefits 

Fixed term contract - 10 months 

Highly motivated Software Developer required to develop our OpenStack cloud platforms, infrastructure and assist our customers migration to distributed compute models.

Opportunity

An exciting Software Development opportunity has become available to further develop our scientic software infrastructure to further assit our scientific research teams in their migration toward a more cloud native environment.

The position will be based in the Scientific Computing area of Sanger’s core IT team, at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. This group currently provides >20,000 cores of traditional HPC compute and now an additional 6,000 cores dedicated to our internal OpenStack cloud.

Specifically, the role will involve developing our OpenStack based virtualised compute infrastructure, including tools for its management, maintenance and R&D. It will also require working closely with our scientific community to provide coding advice, guidance on the best practice use of cloud compute in an efficient, adaptable and scalable fashion.

This position would suit a Software Developer who enjoys developing software solutions for large scale data analysis, and would like to take on the challenge of an evolving devops environment.

We are looking for an individual who enjoys working in a multi-disciplinary team environment to help solve complex IT issues with an open mind.

Reference:83513

Staff Scientist (Data) - Defining the genetic drivers of cancer

Salary range £36,737 - £44,451 depending on experience plus excellent benefits

Permanent/ open contract

We seek a talented and highly motivated Staff Scientist (Data) to play a crucial role in new research on cancer mutations at the Wellcome Sanger Institute within the COSMIC group (http://cancer.sanger.ac.uk/)

The Opportunity

We have started a new project aiming to characterise every genetic mutation in every form of cancer, to define - at high-resolution across global populations - the important events which are driving disease. We aim to take a very broad approach across millions of variants and hundreds of cancer disease types, to identify which variants act as drivers of disease, described in terms of their biological and biochemical properties. You will help us making sense of these huge and complex data, inferring relationships between variables, identifying those variants which act as drivers of disease, and then correlating how they work together to cause disease progression. As this information is vital for use in pharmaceutical and clinical applications, we have partnered with AstraZeneca on this project, working closely with their Oncology division, and therefore this research will impact directly on the discovery and development of new precision medicines. The results of this project will be available to the scientific community through COSMIC resources, and will offer multiple opportunities for very citeable publications.

About you

You will work together with COSMIC science team, bringing data science expertise to this project. The resources of COSMIC, the world’s largest and most detailed database of cancer mutations will be available to you, including unlimited access to HPC facilities. Within the Sanger Institute, you will have also access to global specialists in genomics with decades of experience discovering new disease genes, who are already exploring these data.

About us

The Wellcome Sanger Institute is a charitably funded research centre and committed to training the next generation of genome scientists. Focused on understanding the role of genetics in health and disease and a world leader in the genomic revolution, our mission is to use genome sequences to advance understanding of human and pathogen biology in order to improve human health. We aim to provide results that can be translated into diagnostics, treatments or therapies that reduce global health burdens. Our science is large-scale and organised into Programmes, led by our Faculty who conceive and deliver our science, and supported by our Scientific Operations teams responsible for all data production pipelines at the Institute.

COSMIC

A revolution is underway in health informatics, with genetics increasingly important in understanding human health and disease. COSMIC (http://cancer.sanger.ac.uk/), a database of genetic mutations in cancer, is a major resource in cancer research, used by over 4000 scientists every day across the informatics, diagnostic and pharmaceutical industries. We are expanding rapidly and developing a range of new services to support multiple academic and industrial research efforts.

Reference:83549

Technical Innovator

Salary range £37,739 to £57,806  depending on skills and experience, both include benefits package

We are seeking to appoint a visionary computer architecture researcher to join our IT team in the role of Technical Innovator. In this unique, exciting and forward-thinking role you will be responsible for defining the future of our hardware and software solutions within the Sanger IT team, providing the opportunity to shape our organisation and Campus, making the huge scale computation challenges of tomorrow possible.

The Sanger Institute is a world leader in bioinformatics research for the benefit of human health. Specifically, our scientific niche is in large-scale, high-throughput biology, often incorporating systematic genome-wide screens. These are enabled by major data generation platforms in DNA sequencing, cellular genetics and mouse genetics with an accompanying large IT platform supporting computational data analysis.

To support such a vibrant, wide-ranging and creative research community, the Sanger Institute has one of the world’s largest life science IT facilities. Our facilities currently provide research groups with HPC clusters that deliver more than 20,000 compute cores, 15 PB of high performance Lustre file systems and data repositories exceeding 16PB.

The recent addition of a Flexible Compute Environment, based on OpenStack and 100GB/s software defined networking, exceeds 6000 further CPU’s and provides 1PB of high performance object storage to our customers. This new environment provides exciting opportunities to our research community both for collaboration and to embrace otherwise disruptive technologies as they come to market.

Such flexibility is key to our being able to adapt to the rapidly developing requirements of our scientific environment. Remaining at the leading edge of technology will be key to our IT strategy over the forthcoming years.

We are therefore delighted to announce that we are looking for an enthusiastic individual to compliment our existing IT staff. This exciting role is to look 5+ years ahead to what may be possible, rather than technology that is available today. You will evaluate how it aligns with our developing scientific challenges and how we can further engage with our strategic commercial and scientific IT partners to develop the solutions that we will need in the future.

For such a blue-sky research position, you should possess a mixture of talents and qualifications, and will be able to demonstrate:

• A strong and creative problem-solving mentality.
• An open and enquiring approach to IT, its challenges and how to overcome them.
• Highly self-motivated and with a will to share and disseminate information
• An ability to present new ideas and opportunities to a wider audience of both highly technical and non-technical audiences
• Provide contributions to wider audiences through peer review papers and conference presentations and posters.
• The proven ability to rapidly learn and evaluate new methods and tools
• Excellent written, verbal and numerical skills.
• Forward and independent thinking!

We believe that this post would be ideally suited to someone with a high degree in a computation or mathematic or scientific background. Specific knowledge of cloud or HPC technologies is desirable but a deep understanding and the implementation of today’s IT technologies, such as machine learning and computation approaches is more important.

This is a fantastic opportunity to not just join a world leading genetics research institute but also to help shape its IT future!

Reference:83542