PhD or postdoc position available @The Laboratory of Computational Biology, within the Center for Human Genetics - University of Leuven

Regulatory Genomics and cis-Regulatory Variation

The Laboratory of Computational Biology, within the Center for Human Genetics - University of Leuven, is seeking a highly motivated student or postdoctoral researcher to apply integrative genomics, computational models, and next-generation sequencing, to analyse gene regulation and chromatin conformation. You will develop computational approaches and work in close collaboration with the wet-lab, performing high-throughput experiments using RNA-Seq, ChIP-Seq, damID-Seq, DHS-Seq, FAIRE-Seq, STARR-Seq, and 4C-Seq/HiC. Depending on your interest, you can apply these methods to various systems, either eye development across Drosophila species, or cancer (melanoma, leukaemia). Your challenge is to integrate these data with computational predictions of cis-regulatory modules, and with publicly available data from (mod)ENCODE and TCGA, to ultimately characterize cis-regulatory changes that underlie morphological changes (Drosophila data) or that drive oncogenesis (cancer data). Qualifications for PhD student candidates:

• Interested in the non-coding genome, and highly motivated.
• Experience with bioinformatics programming and statistics for bioinformatics, including scripting (e.g., Python), R (incl. Bioconductor), or programming (Java). Or experience with machine learning.
• Being eligible for a PhD fellowship (VLK May 2013, IWT August 2013, FWO Jan 2014).

Qualifications for postdoc candidates:

• PhD degree in Life sciences, computational, or engineering field
• Track record of high-impact publications in the field of computational biology, analysis of high-throughput data sets, data integration
• Solid experience with bioinformatics programming and statistics for bioinformatics, including scripting (e.g., Python), R (incl. Bioconductor), Galaxy, UCSC Genome Browser, Ensembl API, etc.
• Experience with pathway analysis and cis-regulatory sequence analysis is a plus.
• Thorough understanding of molecular and developmental biology, expertise on cancer biology is a plus.
• Experience with programming (e.g., Java) is a plus.
• Experience with data mining and machine learning is a plus.
• Experience with the analysis of next-generation sequence data is a plus: whole exome re-sequencing, whole-genome re-sequencing, SNP/indel calling, CNV, Structural variation; RNA-Seq, ChIP-Seq
• Being eligible for a postdoctoral fellowship at the national level (e.g., IWT, FWO, VLK), or at the international level (e.g., EMBO, HFSP). Deadline for Pegasus Fellowships is May 1st 2013.

Links:

• The Laboratory of Computational Biology
• Center for Human Genetics
• University of Leuven

Highly motivated candidates can apply by sending a motivation letter, names and contact information for at least two references, publication list, and CV to stein.aerts@med.kuleuven.be.