About BSC
The Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) is the leading supercomputing center in Spain. It houses MareNostrum, one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe, was a founding and hosting member of the former European HPC infrastructure PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe), and is now hosting entity for EuroHPC JU, the Joint Undertaking that leads large-scale investments and HPC provision in Europe. The mission of BSC is to research, develop and manage information technologies in order to facilitate scientific progress. BSC combines HPC service provision and R&D into both computer and computational science (life, earth and engineering sciences) under one roof, and currently has over 800 staff from 55 countries.
We are particularly interested for this role in the strengths and lived experiences of women and underrepresented groups to help us avoid perpetuating biases and oversights in science and IT research.
Context And Mission
The Computational Biology Group, within the Life Sciences Department at the BSC, is involved in multiple projects covering several areas of precision medicine, systems biology, network science, and epidemiology.
The Computational Biology group, led by ICREA professor Alfonso Valencia, is looking for a PhD student to work in the framework of a project of the Knowledge Generation Projects call for proposals: Health trajectories and the role of sex, gender, ageing, and treatments in comorbidities. This project is divided into two main sections. The first focuses on analysing Electronic Health Records from different populations, combining disease diagnoses with drug prescription and administration information. Its main objective is to generate health trajectories, which will allow evaluation of the impact of the co-occurrence of chronic diseases and the co-administration of drugs on the risk of developing secondary diseases. Given that as we age, the risk of multimorbidities (and the consequent co-administration of drugs) increases, this is a fundamental point since it has been described, but not systematically analysed, that the co-occurrence of diseases increases the risk of developing new diseases, putting at greater risk the lives of adults in particular. The second section provides biological hypotheses to disease co-occurrences using molecular data. More specifically, biological alterations that promote differences in comorbidity relationships between sexes will be analysed. In addition, information on disease-associated mutations will be combined with expression data from different tissues to study, from a molecular point of view, the impact of ageing on the risk of developing secondary diseases.
The PhD student will work in a highly sophisticated High-Performance Computing (HPC) environment, have access to state-of-the-art systems and computational infrastructures, and establish collaborations with international and local experts in different areas of biomedical research.
Key Duties
- Integration of heterogeneous data sources using advanced data mining techniques.
- Preparation and presentation of scientific articles
- Collaborate in the preparation and presentation of scientific projects
- Establish and maintain collaborations with international researchers
Requirements
- Education
- Bachelor in biology, biotechnology, medicine, or a degree in science or engineering with sufficient knowledge and interest in biology.
- MSc in bioinformatics, computational biology or similar.
- Essential Knowledge and Professional Experience
- Previous experience in omics data analysis, network analysis, and basic knowledge of epidemiology.
- High motivation and scientific interest.
- Additional Knowledge and Professional Experience
- Knowledge and experience in life sciences research.
- Knowledge and some experience in statistics.
- Knowledge and some experience in AI methodologies.
- Programming: R and Python.
- Fluency in spoken and written English.
- Competences
- Good communication and presentation skills.
- Ability to work both independently and within a team.
Conditions
- The position will be located at BSC within the Life Sciences Department
- We offer a full-time contract (37.5h/week), a good working environment, a highly stimulating environment with state-of-the-art infrastructure, flexible working hours, extensive training plan, restaurant tickets, private health insurance, support to the relocation procedures
- Duration: Predoctoral contract
- Holidays: 23 paid vacation days plus 24th and 31st of December per our collective agreement
- Salary: we offer a competitive salary commensurate with the qualifications and experience of the candidate and according to the cost of living in Barcelona
- Starting date: 1st of October
Applications procedure and process
All applications must be made through BSC website bottom application form and contain:
- A full CV in English including contact details
- A Cover Letter with a statement of interest in English, including two contacts for further references - Applications without this document will not be considered
In accordance with the OTM-R principles, a gender-balanced recruitment panel is formed for every vacancy at the beginning of the process. After reviewing the content of the applications, the panel will start the interviews, with at least one technical and one administrative interview. A profile questionnaire as well as a technical exercise may be required during the process.
The panel will make a final decision and all candidates who had contacts with them will receive a feedback with details on the acceptance or rejection of their profile.
At BSC we are seeking continuous improvement in our recruitment processes, for any suggestions or feedback/complaints about our Recruitment Processes, please contact recruitment@bsc.es.
For more information follow this link
Deadline
The vacancy will remain open until suitable candidate has been hired. Applications will be regularly reviewed and potential candidates will be contacted.
OTM-R principles for selection processes
BSC-CNS is committed to the principles of the Code of Conduct for the Recruitment of Researchers of the European Commission and the Open, Transparent and Merit-based Recruitment principles (OTM-R). This is applied for any potential candidate in all our processes, for example by creating gender-balanced recruitment planels and recognizing career breaks etc.
BSC-CNS is an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity and inclusion. We are pleased to consider all qualified applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability or any other basis protected by applicable state or local law.
For more information follow this link
Original source: https://www.bsc.es/join-us/fellowships/38623lscbr1