YOUR TASKS AND RESPONSIBILITIES

As a member (m/f/d) of a joint team of the Analytical Development, Cell Line & Upstream Development, Process Analytical Technologies (PAT) and Biotech Data Science departments within the Biologics Technology Organization of Bayer Pharmaceuticals, you will have the opportunity to apply your knowledge and experience in computational biology and data science for advancing analytics, monitoring and controlling of new biotechnological processes. Self-motivated, you will work independently, prioritize and schedule your own tasks, and actively drive your research and development projects. In detail, you will:

• Support the development of Advanced Therapy Medicinal Products (ATMPs) - innovative cell and gene therapies - by delivering state-of-the-art analytical methods for process and product characterization
• Provide computational and statistical support for data analysis and experimental design
• Establish and optimize diverse Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) and/or image analysis methods broadly applicable in the cell and gene therapy context (e.g. bulk and single-cell RNA sequencing, high-content microscopy, live cell and holographic imaging, etc.)
• Develop pipelines and tools for analysis and visualization of NGS and/or image-based data
• Analyze and interpret data in a biological context for NGS (clustering, multidimensional scaling, differential expression, biomarker discovery, cell differentiation, heterogeneity analysis) and/or image analysis (segmentation, tracking, object recognition, categorization, feature extraction, classification, etc.)
• Combine large data sets from different analytical sources for predicting the current state or the outcome of a biotechnological process

WHO YOU ARE

• PhD in computational biology or data science (bioinformatics, genomics, image analysis or comparable) with excellent statistical knowledge and experience with analysis of high-dimensional or large-scale functional genomics and/or image datasets
• Proven track record of working with NGS and/or image processing, analysis and interpretation, based on a solid understanding of molecular and cell biology; knowledge in immunology is advantageous
• Advanced programming and data visualization skills (e.g. Python, R, etc.) as well as experience with Linux/Unix, computational analysis pipelines (e.g. batch scripting, Common Workflow Language, Nextflow), high performance computing clusters, cloud computing (e.g. AWS) and version control systems
• Experience with data mining, modeling, transformation and classification of large data sets (e.g. dimensionality reduction, PCA, cluster analysis, feature extraction, etc.)
• Knowledge of R-Bioconductor (e.g. DESeq2, monocle, etc.) and/or image analysis software (ImageJ/FIJI, CellProfiler, CellCognition, Ilastic, etc.) is desirable
• Experience with machine learning approaches and respective toolkits (e.g. TensorFlow, PyTorch, scikeit-learn, Keras) is a plus, experience with databases and SQL is a plus as well
• Enjoy working in a collaborative environment to connect different scientific disciplines and to contribute to multidisciplinary teams
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills in English, German is a plus

This is a fixed-term PostDoc contract for 2 years.