Computational Biologist 1

Department Overview

This position is a member of the Computational Biology Program at OHSU and will support development of research software and user-facing applications for precision nutrition. The position will translate computational biology methods, biomedical data, and nutrition-related algorithms into accessible software tools integrating nutrition, metabolomic, genomic/transcriptomic, and phenotypic data.

Work will combine application development, computational biology, database/cloud engineering, and scientific software deployment, including native and web application components, Python/R analytical workflows and APIs, structured data management, testing, version control, documentation, and reproducible software practices. The employee will collaborate with investigators to refine application functions and will follow appropriate data-security and privacy practices for biomedical or health-related data.

Function/Duties of Position

Precision Nutrition Application Development

• Design, develop, test, and maintain user-facing precision-nutrition research applications. Implement native and/or web interfaces, connect application components to computational services and APIs, and translate research prototypes into reliable software for investigators and collaborators.

Data, Database, and Cloud Infrastructure

• Build and maintain structured systems for nutrition, omic, phenotypic, and application data.
• Develop database schemas and data-access workflows; support local/cloud deployment; and implement appropriate authentication, data integrity, backup, security, and scalable-computing practices.

Computational Biology and Algorithm Integration

• Develop and integrate Python/R analytical pipelines for biomedical and nutrition-related data.
• Support genomic, transcriptomic, single-cell, metabolomic, and other high-dimensional data analyses; implement statistical or machine-learning methods; and convert research algorithms into reusable application modules or services.

Software Quality, Deployment, and Research Collaboration

• Use structured software-engineering practices including Git/GitHub, documentation, issue tracking, testing, code review, and reproducible workflows.
• Troubleshoot applications and pipelines, support cross-platform deployment and user testing, and work with researchers to refine functionality and support scholarly outputs.

Other duties as assigned.

Required Qualifications

• Master's Degree in Computational Biology or related field; OR

• Bachelor's Degree in Computational Biology or related field AND 3 years of relevant experience.

Skills and Abilities

• Computational biology/bioinformatics, scientific software development, or data-driven biomedical applications.

• Programming for data analysis or scientific software development using Python and/or R, preferably in Linux/Unix.

• Structured data storage, relational databases, or multi-component data-processing systems.

• Biomedical, bioinformatics, genomic/transcriptomic, machine-learning, or related quantitative data analysis.

• Basic statistics, reproducible coding practices, and version-control workflows.

• Strong troubleshooting, task prioritization, communication, organization, and ability to work independently and collaboratively.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience developing user-facing scientific or health-data software in collaborative or interdisciplinary research settings.

• Native or web application development using Swift/SwiftUI/Cocoa, R Shiny, Django, Unity, or comparable frameworks.

• SQL databases such as PostgreSQL/SQLite; API integration/authentication; and cloud platforms such as AWS.

• Next-generation sequencing, single-cell RNA-seq, transcriptomics/omics pipelines, and/or machine-learning methods such as matrix factorization or network analysis.

• Git/GitHub, testing, issue tracking, cross-platform QA, and application deployment.

• Health-data privacy/security or HIPAA-aware data-management practices.

• Precision nutrition, precision health, digital health, or translational biomedical research.

• Immune cell deconvolution of mouse data.
• AWS or comparable cloud certification/experience preferred.

Additional Details

Benefits 

• Healthcare for full-time employees covered 100% and 88% for dependents.
• $50K of term life insurance provided at no cost to the employee.
• Two separate above market pension plans to choose from.
• Paid time off - 208 hours per year, prorated for part-time.
• Extended illness bank - 64 hours per year, prorated for part-time.
• 9 paid holidays per year.
• Substantial Tri-Met and C-Tran discounts.
• Employee Assistance Program.
• Childcare service discounts.
• Tuition reimbursement.
• Employee discounts to local and major businesses.

Why apply to OHSU?