Postdoc positions in Disease Systems Biology at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research : Copenhagen, Denmark

A number of postdoc positions are available in the Translational Disease Systems Biology group at The Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research. The Center has been established at the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Copenhagen, to promote basic and applied discovery research on human proteins of medical relevance. The Center comprises a wide range of expertise and resources including proteomics, protein production, bioinformatics and general characterization of disease mechanisms. The Programme for Disease Systems Biology consists of two research groups covering many systems level aspects of biology and medicine, including the integration of molecular-level data and healthcare data, for example laboratory test data and biomedical texts.

Responsibilities and tasks

The Translational Disease Systems Biology group led by Søren Brunak focuses on establishing early competitive advantage in disease-relevant computational analysis across the general areas of bioinformatics, chemoinformatics, systems biology and medical informatics. The PhD students will work on data-driven models of temporal disease development (diabetes, other immune system related disorders, comorbidities in general) using a combination of molecular data and data from the healthcare sector, where the latter has the form of registry data or complete electronic patient records. These models will in part be descriptive and show how different diseases and diagnosis follow each other over long periods of time and in part predictive in the sense that longitudinal patterns of illnesses, medication and procedures will indicate future events. The models may be augmented by molecular level biomarker data from genomics or proteomics further increasing the predictive power.

Projected start date: Early 2016.

Qualifications

Candidates for the postdoctoral positions must hold a PhD degree (or equivalent). The successful candidates will have strong qualifications or experience within one or several of the following areas:
• Bioinformatics and systems biology at the molecular level
• NGS or clinical proteomics data
• Disease biology
• Healthcare data from registries and electronic patient records
• Competence in statistics and/or machine learning techniques
• Experience with health care terminologies, schemes and ontologies

The translational disease systems biology is highly multidisciplinary and collaborates with many other research groups nationally and internationally. Strong networking and team player skills are therefore preferred. As the candidate may run several projects in parallel, strong organizational skills and the ability to keep an overview are important.

A medical or pharmaceutical background will be a strong advantage.