USDA-ARS Post-Bachelor's Internship in Software Engineering for Computational Biology

Qualifications

• The qualified candidate should have received a bachelor's degree in the one of the relevant fields (Computer Science, Software Engineering, or comparable field).
• Degree must have been received within the past five years.

Preferred Skills

• Knowledge of basic concepts in genomic sequence analysis and plant genetics.
• Unix scripting, knowledge of a scripting language such as Python, Perl, awk, or R, and knowledge of core formats and methods for handling genomic sequence and gene annotation data.

Learning Objectives

Under the guidance of a mentor, you will have the opportunity to learn to:

• apply methods in software engineering in support of online computational tools such as data curation, preparation, and validation.

Mentor(s)

The mentor for this opportunity is Steven Cannon (steven.cannon@usda.gov).

If you have questions about the nature of the research, please contact the mentor(s).

Application Deadline

8/28/2026 3:00:00 PM Eastern Time Zone

Research Project

The USDA research project that you will be a part of has a mission to provide stewardship of soybean and other major legume genetic, genomic, and phenotypic datasets, to support research and crop improvement. Basic and applied research is also conducted within this project. You will focus on computational tool development to aid in project curation of published biological data, and also to better integrate with other USDA genetic database projects, including GRIN-Global. This will help breeders and researchers to make better use of germplasm data at the ARS germplasm repository, and to utilize software development across the Agency. This opportunity will mostly be conducted in a Unix environment and on high-performance computing equipment.

Stipend

$55,572.00 - $87,440.00 Yearly

Citizenship Requirements

This opportunity is available to U.S. citizens only.

Contact Information

Questions: Please visit our Program Website.

After reading, if you have additional questions about the application process, please email ORISE.ARS.Midwest@orau.org and include the reference code for this opportunity.