Csiro Winanga-y Postdoctoral Fellowship in

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**The Opportunity**:

- **Do you have a PhD in **quantitative/statistical genetics, applied statistics, data science, applied mathematics, computational biology, genomics or plant breeding?**:

- **Explore new digital based technologies to optimize the design of plant breeding, to more efficiently generate better plant varieties**:

- **Join the CSIRO Agriculture & Food Breeding Innovations Group for this 3-year postdoctoral fellowship role**

CSIRO Early Research Career (CERC) Postdoctoral Fellowships provide opportunities to scientists and engineers who have completed their doctorate and have less than three years of relevant postdoctoral work experience. These fellowships aim to develop the next generation of future leaders of the innovation system.

We are thrilled to be able to deliver on the commitment we made in our strategy to invest in frontier science with the new CSIRO Agriculture & Food Winanga-y Postdoctoral Fellowship scheme. The word Winanga-y (pronounced win-na-gnay) is a cultural asset gifted by the Gomeroi Nation in Myall Vale to CSIRO's Agriculture and Food Business Unit to name the Postdoctoral Fellowship Scheme. Winanga-y means to understand, know, remember, and think.

CSIRO Agriculture & Food's Breeding Innovations Group requires an innovative and forward-thinking computational geneticist to join the team breeding innovations group. The CERC Fellow will build mathematical and computational approaches to optimize the experimental design in a plant breeding program on the basis of genomic, phenotype and pedigree data, using various modern optimization methods such as combinatorial optimization and Bayesian optimization. The CERC Fellow will play a leading role on method development and validation, and ultimately will collaborate with the breeders to integrate the methodology into the CSIRO’s cotton breeding program to deliver successful cotton cultivars.

**Your duties will include**:

- Recognising and exploiting opportunities for innovation and the generation of new theoretical perspectives, and progress opportunities for the further development or creation of new lines of research. This will include the development of multiple objective optimization algorithms to maximize the experimental design for a cotton breeding program.
- Recording, managing, and analysing data using relevant data science techniques. Data streams may include genotype, phenotype, pedigree and environment data. This will require close collaboration with the teams generating the data to ensure that it remains relevant for both conventional and advanced genetic approaches to cotton improvement.
- Communicating complex research findings to the industry collaborators including CSIRO cotton breeders. Also working with breeders to assist them in developing new breeding strategies and decision-making tools to enhance the rate of genetic gain in cotton and increase the profitability and sustainability of Australian cotton production.

**Location**: Black Mountain, Canberra, ACT

**Salary**: AU$92k - AU$101k plus up to 15.4% superannuation

**Tenure**: Specified term of 3 years

**Reference**: 94946

**To be considered you will need**:

- A doctorate (or will shortly satisfy the requirements of a PhD) in a relevant discipline area, such as quantitative/statistical genetics, applied statistics, data science, applied mathematics, computational biology, genomics or plant breeding. Please note: To be_ _eligible for this role you must have no more than 3 years (full-time equivalent) of postdoctoral research experience_._
- Demonstrated skills in the handling and analysis of large-scale biological datasets such as genomic, phenomic and pedigree data.
- Knowledge and experience of mathematical optimization techniques such as in the area of convex, nonlinear, stochastic and dynamic programming, combinatorial and Bayesian optimization.
- Evidence of advanced programming skills relevant to scientific computation and statistics (e.g. R, Python, Fortran, C++ or equivalent).

For full details about this role please view the Position Description

**Eligibility**:
**Flexible Working Arrangements**:
We work flexibly at CSIRO, offering a range of options for how, when and where you work.

**Diversity and Inclusion**:
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