Post-doctoral Position in Virus Evolution and Bioinformatics

Funding is immediately available for a two-year post-doctoral associate in Dr. Art Poon's bioinformatics group in the Department of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine at Western University, Canada.

This position is supported by a grant to develop and evaluate new computational methods to detect infectious disease outbreaks from the comparative analysis of genetic sequence databases. Genetic clustering is an intuitive and popular methodology for prioritizing groups for public health intervention; however, the statistical properties of these methods are poorly understood and they have seldom been evaluated in a quantitative framework. The project will build on work recently published by the group, including https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005868 and https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2352301816000461.

Candidates should have a PhD in any of the following disciplines: mathematics; statistics; biology; epidemiology; computer science; or a related quantitative field to any of these disciplines. Proficiency in at least one interpreted or compiled programming language is mandatory. Experience with C/C++, Python and/or R is strongly preferred. The candidate should be acquainted with working within a UNIX-like development environment. Candidates should have a demonstrated ability for effective written and oral (English) communication, scientific collaboration in a group, adhere to good coding practices, and to author scientific papers.

This position will be based in the Department of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine within the Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry at Western University in London, Ontario. The Poon Lab (http://github.com/PoonLab) operates on its own small (128-core) high-performance computing cluster and a large number of custom-built Linux workstations. Dr. Poon is an active open-source developer (http://github.com/ArtPoon), a major contributor to the phylogenetic software package HyPhy (http://hyphy.org), and has authored 90 peer-reviewed publications to date in bioinformatics and virus evolution (http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3779-154X).

Qualified and interested applicants are invited to send a statement of interest, CV and contact information for two references to apoon42@uwo.ca