Bioinformatician I

ASRT, Inc. provides scientific, information management, management consulting, bioinformatics, and administrative program support to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other Federal and private sector clients. The successful candidate will be a full-time employee of ASRT, Inc. and will be assigned to the Waterborne Disease Prevention Branch (WDPB), Division of Foodborne, Waterborne, and Environmental Diseases (DFWED), National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases (NCEZID), at the CDC in Atlanta, GA.

About the role

The Bioinformatician I will provide technical and intellectual support for whole genome sequencing analysis, metagenomic analysis, and genome-based typing systems to improve molecular detection of waterborne and environmentally acquired diseases. This includes the use of statistical analysis techniques and bioinformatics tools for the analysis of program-generated laboratory data.

Domestic and international travel may be required. Telework may be considered for staff not needing to be physically present to conduct their duties or in the event of campus closures.

Responsibilities

• Works with team to implement bioinformatics workflows/pipelines to perform wastewater metagenomic analytics for NWSS program
• Assists with the development of statistical methods to identify variants and potential abundance based on mutations in wastewater sequencing data sets
• Assists with the design of visual analytics or reporting tools to interpret metagenomics analyses results
• Assists with the development of standardized bioinformatics outputs for integration into the DECIPHER platform
• Performs quality control, assembly, and analysis of environmental metagenomic sequencing samples
• Manages high-throughput sequencing raw and analytic data files, databases, including uploads to NCBI or other similar sequencing repositories
• Prepares and delivers clear, concise, and accurate reports, presentations, and scientific manuscripts
• Assists with waterborne and environmental outbreak response
• Travels to present scientific findings at annual scientific meetings and conferences as assigned by the Principal Investigator or to assist with training

Requirements

• Master's Degree, or other advanced degree, in public health, epidemiology, computer science, bioinformatics, biostatistics, biological sciences, or a related field
• Demonstrated experience with a broad range of data analysis and management skills and working with a multidisciplinary team
• Experience with development and management of a complex relational database
• Experience working with statistical software such as SAS, R, Stata, or similar software
• Proficiency with Microsoft Access and Excel
• Organizational skills demonstrating high attention to detail and the ability to organize multiple priorities
• Strong interpersonal skills required to work within a multidisciplinary team
• Ability to work independently and maintain flexibility to respond to requests for support of ongoing projects
• Excellent oral and written communication skills in English
• Must be a United States citizen or permanent resident or have authorization for employment in the United States

Skills

• Knowledge in utilization of high-performance computing environments, cloud computing, and software/programming applications like Python, R, Perl
• Experience with open-source bioinformatics tools such as Bowtie2, Velvet, Spades, Prodigal
• Familiarity with software/code versioning such as GitLab, GitHub
• Experience with workflow managers/containerization tools such as Docker, SnakeMake, Singularity
• Comfort working in a fast-paced and highly interdisciplinary environment
• Experience scripting in at least one language (Python, R, or shell preferred)
• Basic statistics training
• Familiarity with UNIX command line bioinformatics tools, version control systems, and code repositories (e.g., GitHub)
• Analysis of next-generation sequencing data, including QC, alignment, quantification, or phylogeny tools