Computational Research Assistant

The Garvan Institute of Medical Research brings together world-leading clinicians and basic and translational researchers to break down barriers between traditional scientific disciplines and find solutions to disease.

THE OPPORTUNITY

The Research Assistant is accountable for assisting with bioinformatic analysis of experiments conducted within the Swarbrick Laboratory, with strategic guidance and training from postdoctoral bioinformaticians in the Swarbrick Laboratory.

Major projects include generation of an international, large-scale, multi-omic breast cancer atlas and understanding the cellular mediators of response to cancer immunotherapy in breast cancer and melanoma. The Laboratory is generating substantial single-cell sequencing (scRNA-Seq), spatial transcriptomics and other genomic and proteomic datasets from clinical samples and preclinical models.

This role will suit a computational science/bioinformatics graduate with training and experience in advanced computational techniques and with an interest in cancer biology, spatial biology or cellular genomics.

**Salary**: $79,500 + 14% super + salary packaging
- Employment Type: 2 year term contract

SNAPSHOT OF BENEFITSGenerous salary packaging to save you income tax on your wages thereby boosting your monthly take home pay (max. $15,900 general expenses + $2,650 meals/accom)-
- Ample opportunities for on-going training and development-
- Stimulating, diverse and highly international research environment-
- Flexible work arrangements e.g. start / finish times etc-
- 18 weeks paid parental leave for both parents including paid superannuation-
- A range of additional leave types to meet your personal needs including cultural leave, conference leave, community service and study leave-
- Discounted Health Insurance-
- Lifestyle discounts with our community partnersWHAT YOU WILL DO

Key responsibilities include:
- Developing, maintaining and executing bioinformatic pipelines/workflows, particularly in relation to scRNA-seq and spatial transcriptomic data-
- Contribute to the existing codebase in collaboration with other team members, including debugging, refactoring and enhancing legacy code-
- Document new code, and make improvements to existing documentation-
- Track, archive and actively manage raw and processed data in accordance with established procedures and policies-
- Analyse clinical and experimental data, with an emphasis on relevance to clinical translation-
- Assist other team members with their analyses-
- Adopt, test and benchmark analytical packages for incorporation into analyses and standardised pipelines-
- Present results internally and externallyABOUT YOUThe position would suit a graduate from a quantitative discipline (bioinformatics, statistics, mathematics, physics, software engineering, information technology, computer science or a related field)-
- Experience with version control systems, particularly git-
- Experience with R and/or Python-
- Experience with workflow control frameworks, such as Snakemake and/or Nextflow-
- Familiarity with the Unix command line and high-performance computing environments and/or cloud computing-
- Knowledge of the fundamentals of molecular biology: DNA transcription and translation-
- Skills in analysis of large molecular datasets, such as WGS, RNA-seq, ChIP-seq, etc. Experience with scRNA-seq and spatial technologies such as Visium or Xenium would be particularly beneficial-
- Strong commitment to data organisation and implementation of quality controls-
- Excellent communication skills for written reports and oral presentations-
- Desire to work co-operatively with other team membersABOUT GARVAN

The Garvan Institute of Medical Research is an independent Medical Research Institute (MRI) in Sydney, delivering scientific and clinical impact on a global basis and in partnership with organisations that share our vision. We are proud to be one of Australia’s largest and most highly regarded MRI’s.

Our vision is global leadership in discoveries to impact and our enduring purpose is to impact human health, by harnessing information encoded in our genome.

We seek to see our world-class discovery research achieve life-changing impacts, not only for individual patients with rare diseases, but for the many thousands affected by complex, common disease.
- Garvan promotes a diverse workplace and is committed to the principles of equity, diversity, inclusion and belonging. We are always looking for culture ‘add_
- ’,_
- not culture ‘fit’ and are building diverse teams with great sets of complementary styles and skills to help deliver our important work effectively._

HOW TO APPLY