ILRI Research Officer I – Bioinformatics Jobs in Kenya

ILRI Research Officer I – Bioinformatics Jobs in Kenya

The International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) seeks to recruit a Research Officer I to design and perform bioinformatics analyses, including whole-genome reconstruction from nanopore long reads. The incumbent will work closely with the Head of Data and Research Methods, as well as the scientists in the Biosciences Directorate, including the genomics platform.

ILRI works to improve food security and nutrition and reduce poverty in developing countries through research for efficient, safe and sustainable use of livestock. It is the only one of 11 CGIAR research centers dedicated entirely to animal agriculture research for the developing world. Co-hosted by Kenya and Ethiopia, ILRI has regional or country offices and projects in East, South and Southeast Asia as well as Central, East, Southern and West Africa.

Key Responsibilities

Perform computational analyses of complex genomics and other ‘-omics’ datasets (sequence alignments, FASTA, SAM/BAM and VCF files, phylogenetic trees, etc), provide synthetic and graphical representations of the results, and interpret the same

Drive post-sequencing analyses (whole-genome reconstruction at chromosome or telomere-to-telomere level) based on long reads obtained from ILRI’s Oxford Nanopore Technologies platform.

Help scientists design and run their experiments on the same platform

Make the most effective use of the computational resources on ILRI’s High Performance Cluster; participate actively in the development of in-house scripts and pipelines to be hosted on BecA’s GitHub account and other ad-hoc storage space. Use and develop Nextflow/Airflow pipelines whenever necessary

Participate in the designing, planning and delivering capacity building activities such as short training workshops, seminars, bioinformatics Communities of Practice, etc

Provide informed advice to the Head of Data & Research Methods on questions pertaining to the maintenance and development of the bioinformatics platform (on both hardware and software aspects)

Contribute to the resource mobilisation efforts, be they in human resource (e.g. recruiting external trainers for workshops) or financial

resource (e.g. writing grant proposals)

Support student supervision and academic capacity-building activities, especially in the frameworks of the One CGIAR Initiatives

Perform any other related duties as may be required

Requirements

Masters degree in computer science, data science, bioinformatics, computational biology, biotechnology, biostatistics or a relevant field.

Three years relevant experience with at least some analysis work performed based on 454, Ion Proton, Illumina, Oxford Nanopore or PacBio sequencing data.

Excellent working knowledge of GNU/Linux systems such as Debian/Ubuntu or CentOS

Ability to read and write programs fluently in at least two of the following languages: Python, Bash, R, Perl

Experience with distributed computing environments with load schedulers such as SLURM, SGE or Torque

Experience with modern version-control platforms for collaborative coding such as GitHub

A good understanding of the principles of molecular biology

A good understanding of the principles of molecular evolution and the ability to perform phylogenetics/phylogeographics reconstruction

An excellent attention to detail that needs to be put constantly in use, especially regarding programming

Familiarity with bioiformatics tools for genome assembly and variant calling

Familiarity with the Oxford Nanopore technology platform will be an added advantage

Familiarity with at least one workflow management system like Nextflow, SnakeMake or Airflow

Knowledge of at least one GUI-based boinformatics suite such as CLC Genomics Workbench, UGENE, Mega, etc.

How to Apply

For more information and job application details, see; ILRI Research Officer I – Bioinformatics Jobs in Kenya

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