Bioinformatician​/Research Consultant

Position: Bioinformatician / Research Consultant

Job Description

As a UW employee, you have a unique opportunity to change lives on our campuses, in our state and around the world. UW employees offer their boundless energy, creative problem‑solving skills, and dedication to build stronger minds and a healthier world.

About the Opportunity

The Division of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the Department of Medicine invites applications for a Bioinformatician / Research Consultant (Level
4). The Seshadri Lab focuses on studying the role of unconventional T cell populations in tuberculosis using advanced techniques in human immunology and computational biology to characterize immune responses during infection and vaccination with mycobacteria. The lab’s research concentrates on the human immune response to Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacteria responsible for tuberculosis, with the aim of contributing to vaccine development.

About

this Opportunity

The candidate will join a growing team of bioinformaticians providing computational analysis and support at UW Medicine’s South Lake Union campus. Reporting to the PI, the candidate will work with the Seshadri Lab group and facilitate analysis of high‑throughput and high‑dimensional datasets generated in an immunology laboratory.

Duties and Responsibilities Research (50%)

• Align and process raw sequence data using bash scripting
• Analyze high‑throughput single‑cell RNA sequencing data using existing R packages (e.g. Seurat)
• Work directly with bench scientists and researchers to explain and modify databases and routine analytic processes to best serve evolving projects
• Develop user‑friendly interfaces for common analytic tasks using Google Colab or Jupyter Notebooks
• Independently create and document efficient, effective and replicable methods for extracting data, writing and applying code, organizing data sources, managing data quality, and explaining complex analytic processes
• Contribute to experimental design with downstream analyses in mind and communicate computational methods and results to immunologists and other non‑computational researchers
• Collaborate with other bioinformaticians on reproducible workflows, shared methods, and community code projects

Data Management and Analytic Processes (25%)

• Perform quality assurance and routine diagnostics on data and databases
• Develop, document, and maintain code in task‑appropriate language(s) to perform data cleaning, merging, aggregation, manipulation, and formatting of datasets

Publications, Presentations, and Data Requests (25%)

• Create text, tables, figures, and charts for presentations, grants, and publications
• Provide referencing and other support for presentations, grants, and publications
• Perform power calculations or other statistical tasks as required for presentations, grants, and publications
• Execute queries on datasets to respond to the needs of senior researchers and external requests from collaborators

Minimum Requirements

• Master’s degree in Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, or a related field and four years of relevant experience

Equivalent education and/or experience may substitute for minimum qualifications except where legal requirements (license, certification, registration) apply.

Desired Qualifications

• Fluency in R or Python and reproducible documentation with integrated development environments such as R Studio, Jupyter, Spyder, etc.
• Experience with version control in Git and Git Hub
• Interest in global health research
• Demonstrated ability to participate productively in interdisciplinary research teams
• Strong sense of focus and attention to detail
• Self‑motivation and flexibility; strong organization and communication skills
• Experience with single‑cell RNA sequencing workflows (e.g. Seurat)
• Wet‑bench experience or basic understanding of molecular biological concepts
• Experience with Strata, SQL, or other relevant languages
• Familiarity with advanced statistical methods and machine learning
• Experience developing new software packages to handle complex analytic tasks

Working Environmental Conditions

• This is expected to be a fully in‑person position
• Working at a computer for extended periods of time
• Mon‑Fri regular business hours. Occasional evening or weekend work…