ORAU has a job opportunity for a Toxicologist/Biostatistician. This position will support of the overall functions of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, (NIEHS). This contract will last for 5 years. The position is contingent on award of an upcoming contract with NIEHS. ORAU offers a competitive total compensation plan with salary and benefits commensurate with the role. The project is expected to begin in September 2023. For interest in future opportunity, apply today!

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Supporting multi-disciplinary projects requiring bioinformatics analysis of toxicology and environmental health research
• Supporting transcriptomics and toxicogenomics studies

The project team will conduct toxicogenomics studies (transcriptomics applied to toxicology) as part of short term, long term and/or in vitro exposure studies followed by use of microarray or Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) platforms. This requirement focuses on transcriptomic data including mRNA transcripts, microRNA, and non-coding transcript data. Toxicogenomic studies generate vast amounts of gene expression data that require bioinformatics data analysis such as quality control statistics, normalization, identification of differentially expressed genes and assignment of genes to pathways and networks for biological analysis/interpretation. The candidate shall provide bioinformatics and data mining support for the analysis of RNA-Seq and microarray data. Familiarity with other toxicogenomics database resources (e.g., GEO, SRA) and browsers (e.g., UCSC browser) is required. To support transcriptomic and toxicogenomics studies, the candidate will extract data from a variety of sources including large public and private databases. For example, any Tox21 chemicals and transcript expression data may be extracted from databases; data integration and mining may be requested from documents in EPA dockets. It is anticipated that approximately 5-7 transcriptomics studies per year will need bioinformatics support.

• Supporting High Throughput Transcriptomics (HTT)

As the project team embarks upon the next phase of Tox21 program, the DNTP is conducting transcriptomics experiments using high throughput platforms to screen large numbers of chemicals (See Ramaiahgari et al 2019, ToxSci 169:553-566). For this purpose, the candidate shall assist with selection of key genes to be included in the screening as well as selection of relevant platforms for screening experiments. The candidate may participate in experimental design, gene or cell line selection and bioinformatics analysis of the resulting data. The data to be generated will depend upon the choice of platform used for HTT. The candidate shall provide bioinformatics support for large scale high throughput transcriptomics studies such as the S1500+ platform (See Ramaiahgari et al (2019) Tox Sci 169:553-566). The candidate may provide bioinformatics support for approximately 3-5 high (and/or medium) throughput transcriptomics studies per year.

• Supporting design for studies

It is anticipated that, unique/new study designs or experiment types may be adopted by the client, which may require bioinformatics analysis methods specific to these designs. The candidate contribution to study design shall include but is not limited to types of data reduction methods employed such as clustering analysis and/or data visualization, pathway analysis employed (such as KEGG pathways Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes), IPA (Ingenuity Pathway Analysis, Qiagen) analysis and/or GSEA (Gene Set Enrichment Analysis) and/or SVM (support vector machine) analysis. The candidate shall provide a data management plan for studies as required. The candidate may provide bioinformatic support for up to approximately 3-4 study design or related projects per year.

• Providing toxicology advice and experience to staff for other toxicology-related tasks, as needed

This role may lead to publications and may require some travel to present at industry conferences, such as the Society of Toxicology Annual Meeting.

This successful candidate is expected to have the following credentials.

Education and Relevant Experience

• MS in Toxicology or related field and 3 to 5 years of relevant experience in transcriptomics and toxicogenomics and study design, or
• PhD in Toxicology or related field and 0 to 3 years of relevant experience in transcriptomics and toxicogenomics and study design (preferred)

Other Desirable Skills

• History of publications and presentations in the field of toxicology
• Ability to work with client team members as well as other contractor team members
• Exhibit excellent communications skills
• Experience with implementation of bioinformatics methods for the application of text, information, and data mining techniques within the environmental health sciences
• Programming skills preferably with R or SAS
• Experience with statistical analysis of longitudinal and multivariate discrete data
• Familiarity with high throughput screening (HTS) data, toxicology studies, machine learning and experimental design as needed for genomics studies, dose-response, and environmental health studies.

No immigration support is available for this position; therefore, candidates must be authorized to work in the US without sponsorship support from ORAU. Relocation support is not available.