About the role
The Scientist (Bioinformatician, Pathogen Annotation) provides expertise in pathogen genomics to support a genomic surveillance platform, developing and maintaining annotation tools, defining standards, benchmarking pipelines, and collaborating with engineers and curators to ensure high‑quality data for public health.
ResearchOnsiteA*STAR Infectious Disease Labs
Key Responsibilities
- Adapt and maintain annotation and analysis tools for new pathogens, aligned with biological context and standards
- Translate pathogen biology into requirements for pipelines, dashboards, and visualisations
- Define annotation rules, quality thresholds, and exception handling with curators and bioinformaticians
- Benchmark tools and workflows against reference datasets and external resources
- Collaborate with engineers to drive feature enhancements and performance improvements
- Monitor outputs to detect anomalies and ensure data quality across pathogens
Requirements
- PhD in Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Microbiology, Virology, or related field
- Strong grounding in pathogen genomics and genome organisation
- Familiarity with genome annotation, reference genomes, and comparative genomics
- Experience with sequence formats (FASTA, GFF/GTF) and metadata standards
- Proficiency in Unix/Linux, Git, and scripting (Python or R)
- Experience designing and interpreting validation/benchmarking of bioinformatics tools