Research Officer at KEMRI Wellcome Trust Research Programme (KWTRP)

JOB PURPOSE: 

• To support data science and bioinformatics analysis for a project aimed at developing tools for timely analysis of infectious disease outbreak data that supports rapid and impactful public health response.

Description: 

Reports To:  Study Principal Investigator

Directly Supervises: None

Indirectly Supervises: None

Budget and Resource Responsibility: None.

Key Responsibilities:

• To develop general-purpose computing environments that run analysis on datasets working on local computing environments.
• Develop bioinformatics pipelines that will produce rich, distributable report documents with embedded interactive visualizations and exportable analysis and interpretation results (for example by building on concepts developed in Civet and Piranha tools).
• To test remote execution for a suite of bioinformatics tools across multiple locations.
• To develop protocols for remote execution using messaging protocols such as AMQP (message queuing protocol ,  qRPC (https://grpc.io/) and Docker.
• To Undertake phylogenetic and phylodynamic analyses.
• To produce reports, present arising results, and lead the writing of new scientific manuscripts

Job Specification:

• MSc in Microbiology/Biochemistry/ Bioinformatics/Molecular Biology with at least 2 years of work experience
• BSc in Bioinformatics, or similar (Upper second honours or higher), computer science or software engineering

Desirable:

• Undertaken a Post-Graduate Diploma in relevant subject area
• Experience in molecular biology and or analysis of next generation sequence data
• Knowledge and capability in programming for sequence data manipulations (e.g., Julia, R, Python)
• At least one first author scientific publication/contribution in a peer review journal

Physical Environment:

• Based at the KEMRI/Wellcome Trust Research Programme in Kilifi,
• Exposure to materials considered infectious and/or biohazards.

Competencies:

• Demonstrate high levels of integrity and confidentiality 
• Excellent interpersonal, written, presentation and communication skills 
• Good analytical, problem solving and critical thinking skills; 
• Teamwork and ability to work with diverse teams 
• Strong Flexibility, adaptability, multi-tasking and attention to detail 
• Strong team coordination and Supervisory skills.