Location:           Cambridge, MA or up to 100% Virtual

Reports to:        Senior Scientist, Modeling and Statistics

The Role:

We are looking for a computational biologist/biostatistician/bioinformatician to support ongoing clinical trial and basic research microbiome data analysis and to assist in mathematical modeling and statistical analysis of biological datasets towards the development of Vedanta Biosciences’ portfolio of Live Biotherapeutic Products (LBPs) based on defined bacterial consortia. The candidate will work with the Research and Clinical teams to support the declaration of new LBP candidates, define the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics (PK/PD) of LBPs in clinical studies, and investigate microbiota or immune biomarkers of LBP treatment and health-related phenotypic outcomes. We are looking for an individual who is independent, curious, self-motivated, excited to collaborate, and an excellent communicator. The job title and level will correspond to the experience and skills of the selected candidate.

Here’s What You’ll Do:

• Analyze LBP strain colonization and microbiota community dynamics in pre-clinical animal models.
• Conceptualize and perform pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamics (PK/PD) analysis of LBPs in clinical microbiome studies.
• Implement multivariate statistical models to extract associations from translational medicine, pre-clinical, and clinical microbiome datasets. Curate, visualize and communicate analysis results.
• Identify biomarkers that can impact drug development decisions by mining Vedanta’s clinical datasets and using knowledge of disease biology, microbiome science, drug pharmacology, and clinical endpoints.
• Create statistical pre-processing workflows to control structural bias in microbiome data eg. appropriate models for compositional data, zero-inflation, and heteroscedasticity across features, sequencing batch effects etc.
• Develop methods for phenotype prediction using mechanistic tools and supervised machine learning.

Requirements:

• PhD in bioinformatics, computational biology, biological physics, data science, or related quantitative field OR MS with 3+ years of working experience in quantitative statistical or mathematical modeling.
• 4+ years of experience in a statistical programming language, such as R or Python, are required.
• Experience with quantitative statistical and informatics methods including multivariate regression, mixed effects modeling, and supervised and unsupervised machine learning tools including random forest, logistic regression, genome mining, or other related methods is required.
• Analytical experience with clinical trial data is highly desirable.
• Analytical experience with microbiome and microbial community ecology datasets is highly desirable.
• Experience with building reproducible data analysis workflows is required.
• Highly organized and motivated individual. Must be a team player, able to work well in a group setting as well as independently in a fast-paced environment.
• Strong communication and presentation skills are required.