Position Summary:
A Research Assistant position is available in the Division of Gastroenterology at Boston Children’s Hospital in the lab of Dr. Nan Du. This position is ideal for candidates interested in bioinformatics analysis of gastroenterology data as well as recruitment of clinical patients. The research assistant will work as part of a team of scientists and clinicians who focus on analysis of multi-omics data from pediatric gut mucosal tissues in a collaborative translational research environment. Successful candidate will be responsible for recruiting patients and developing pipelines to analyze existing Bulk, and scRNA sequencing data from the lab and integrate this with other publicly available data to understand intestinal physiology and pathology.

Key Responsibilities:

• Direct involvement carrying out various computational projects and assisting other laboratory members
• Under general supervision, develop a variety of routine and specialized computational pipelines for understanding intestinal development using different large -OMICS dataset
• Assist with other computational or software responsibilities including maintenance of database and website as assigned or required
• Maintaining records of results and methodologies in a log of work performed
• Perform statistical analyses and data quality assessments to ensure robust and reliable results
• Contribute to presentations, technical reports and research publications
• Participating in laboratory meetings and presentations
• Assist with other miscellaneous administrative duties as assigned or required
• Assist in consenting and recruiting patients for research studies through personal interviews and written communications with patients/families
• Provide detailed background information regarding studies to families, communicate all policies and procedures, and respond to all inquiries
• Serving as liaison to the families/patients in the research studies, conducted at both on-site and off-site locations, guiding and advising them throughout each phase of the study
• Act as a resource to study participants, addressing any concerns they may have. Troubleshoot resolution of any issues that may arise throughout the study
• Maintaining records of results and methodologies in a log of work performed
• Abstracts, organizes, and understands clinical and non-clinical data and information relevant to the assigned project

Qualifications
Education:

• A Bachelor’s and/or Master’s degree in Life Sciences, Chemistry, or a closely related field

Experience:

• Analytical skills to resolve problems that require the use of scientific, mathematical, or technical principles.
• Candidate must be organized and detail-oriented, proactive, able to work independently as a member of a team, have good problem-solving skills and strong written and verbal communication skills and be comfortable interacting with co-workers and experimentalists
• Able to write, test, automate, and benchmark NGS pipelines, use and build software tools for processing and analyzing various -OMICS modalities
• Capable of conducting all aspects of analyzing one or more -OMICS data types, including preprocessing, quality control, clustering and interpretation
• General interest in gastrointestinal physiology and disease
• Proficiency in programming languages (Python, and/or R)
• Prior experience in a research laboratory and basic understanding of ML models is an asset