Bioinformatics Scientist (Crop Science)

GreenLight Biosciences is seeking a collaborative Bioinformatics Scientist to join our Data Science and Bioinformatics team. You will partner closely with our Plant Health Crop Traits team to deliver on key objectives by applying your knowledge of Genomics, Next Generation Sequencing (NGS), Bioinformatics, Machine Learning, and Biological Computing. In this role, the Bioinformatics Scientist is expected to be integrally involved in Plant Health Discovery research using algorithm design and workflow development to support biological hypotheses creation. The ideal candidate is a scientist-programmer with demonstrated experience in the Crop Sciences domain, with expertise in designing algorithms and utilizing bioinformatics tools to mine public and custom datasets of many types including NGS datasets. Strong interpersonal and technical communication skills combined with a mechanistic understanding of how genes lead to plant traits are essential. 

Responsibilities: 

• Act as a scientific partner to the Crop Traits team, driving innovation for first-of-its-kind RNAi products in the Plant Health space. 
• Design the Crop Traits team’s core resources for hypothesis-based research identifying genotype-phenotype relationships, mining functional and structural annotations, identifying gene expression regulatory mechanisms, key biological pathways, and key protein-protein interactions.  
• Design and implement automated bioinformatics workflows and novel algorithms to derive actionable, novel biological insights from a variety of biological data sets with a focus on plants. 

• Analyze, interpret and extract relevant patterns and insights from NGS (RNA-Seq) and other expression datasets.  
• Design and implement data processing models for large-scale multi-omics datasets (RNA, Protein) combining existing public and commercial tools with innovative solutions 

• Translate bioinformatics analyses and data into actionable biological insights and create intuitive visualizations to communicate concepts effectively to a wide variety of partners and leaders. 
• Continuously align with reporting manager, peers and stakeholders on priorities and best practices. 
• Partner closely with stakeholders on experimental design, sample preparation, data analyses, and reports. 

Required qualifications: 

• Ph.D. in Bioinformatics or related fields such as Computational Biology, Agriculture, Crop Science, Plant Physiology, Genetics, or Computer Science, with a strong focus on algorithm development. 

• >2 years of experience in bioinformatics including algorithm, tool and workflow development with datasets relevant to plants plus NGS analysis. 
• >3 years of programming experience with Python and R. 
• Strong familiarity with concepts in Crop Protection, Crop Traits, functional/structural genomics, gene annotation, and/or RNAi. 
• Expertise in utilizing and configuring public and custom bioinformatics tools and workflows to probe and manipulate gene expression datasets. Proficient in using plant databases such as Phytozome, TAIR, NCBI etc., and associated data storage/retrieval systems. 
• Solid, demonstrable experience developing algorithms for solving biological problems. A biology-centric and data-oriented thought process. 

• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills to translate biologists’ scientific questions into analytical strategies and methods. 
• Demonstrated ability to present complex results, both verbally and in writing, to bioinformatics and non-bioinformatics audiences of all levels is critical. 
• Must be independently driven owning and seeing projects through to completion based on agreed upon deadlines. 
• Must possess a team-oriented working style, scientific curiosity with a problem-solving mindset, organizational skills and an enthusiastic, collaborative spirit. 
• Enthusiasm and interest in unlocking novel areas of potential commercial value in a startup environment. 

Preferred qualifications: 

• Exceptional candidates would have post-PhD Academia or crop protection Industry experience, experience with statistical analyses, machine learning and intuitive visualizations, and strong domain knowledge in RNAi mechanisms, Molecular Biology, and gene expression regulation. 
• Experience with reproducible code frameworks such as JIRA, Trello, Confluence, and GitHub, and workflow management systems like Snakemake. 
• Experience with high-performance computing environments including cloud infrastructures such as Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud (Azure preferred) 

• Enthusiasm and interest in unlocking novel areas of potential commercial value in a startup environment.