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Postdoctoral Training Fellow

Biostatistics

This is a full-time, fixed term position for 4 years on Crick Terms and Conditions of Employment.
Salary between £33,500 – £36,500 per annum, subject to skills & experience.

Context

The Francis Crick Institute is an entirely new institute with a distinctive vision of how biomedical research is conducted. It is one of the most significant projects in UK biomedical science for a generation. The Institute’s labs have an international reputation for cutting edge research into basic biology and are committed to training the next generation of research scientists. The four-year Postdoctoral Programme is part of this commitment, and nearly half of Postdoctoral Fellows leave to set up their own research groups. Postdocs also benefit from living and working in one of the world’s greatest scientific, cultural and cosmopolitan capital cities.

On 1 April 2015, staff from the London Research Institute (CRUK) and National Institute for Medical Research (MRC) transferred to the Crick to form a fully functional research institute on four sites. In 2016, the Crick will move to a single new, purpose built research centre in St. Pancras which will house some 1,500 staff.

We seek a talented and motivated postdoc in (bio)statistics to join Peter Van Loo’s laboratory in Cancer Genomics.

Organisation

Dr. Van Loo’s group focuses on integrative analyses of large-scale public ‘omics data, leveraging the wealth of cancer genomics data into large-scale pan-cancer analyses to understand carcinogenesis and cancer evolution. Example projects include:
• Characterizing the landscape of tumour suppressors across primary tumours using approaches centred on copy number analysis
• Molecular archaeology of cancer: gaining insight into tumour evolution by mining whole genome sequencing data
• Developing methods to deconvolute expression in tumour and admixed normal cells from RNA sequencing data

The laboratory was established on October 1st, 2014 and was part of the Francis Crick Institute from its inception on April 1st, 2015. Dr. Van Loo’s previous research includes approaches for copy number analysis of cancer genomes (Van Loo et al., PNAS 2010), methods to disentangle the subclonal architecture and the life history of cancer based on massively parallel sequencing data (Nik-Zainal et al., Cell 2012; Gundem et al., Nature 2014), and contributions towards the identification of several new cancer genes (Stephens et al., Nature 2013; Tarpey et al., Nat Genet 2013; Behjati et al., Nat Genet 2013; Stephens et al., J Clin Invest 2013; Nangalia et al., N Engl J Med 2013; Behjati et al., Nat Genet 2014).

We seek a talented and motivated biostatistician to join the lab and spearhead projects in cancer genomics, as outlined in the three example projects above.

Person Specification

The post holder should embody and demonstrate our core Crick values: Bold, Imaginative, Open, Dynamic and Collegial, in addition to the following:

Candidates must have a solid theoretical background in (bio)statistics, i.e. either a PhD degree in statistics, biostatistics or a related field, or a master’s degree in (bio)statistics and a PhD in computational biology, biology, biomedicine or a related field.

A background in biology or cancer genomics is not strictly necessary, but you must be keen to work towards understanding cancer biology, carcinogenesis and cancer evolution. Excellent knowledge of a programming language is expected (R/BioConductor, Perl, Python, etc). Prior experience with handling massively parallel sequencing data is considered an advantage.

Postdoc are expected to lead their own project, contribute to other projects on a collaborative basis (both in the lab and with external collaborators) and guide PhD students in their research. The ability to work in a team is essential.