Post Doctoral, Scientific Informatics

Merck is a global health care leader with a diversified portfolio of prescription medicines, vaccines and consumer health products, as well as animal health products. Today, we are building a new kind of healthcare company – one that is ready to help create a healthier future for all of us. Our ability to excel depends on the integrity, knowledge, imagination, skill, diversity and teamwork of people like you. To this end, we strive to create an environment of mutual respect, encouragement and teamwork. As part of our global team, you’ll have the opportunity to collaborate with talented and dedicated colleagues while developing and expanding your career. The Scientific Informatics department partners with diverse business areas across Merck and external organizations from across the healthcare landscape to develop transformative informatics capabilities for developing and delivering products focused on unmet patient need. We are currently seeking outstanding candidates to join our diverse global informatics team, spanning biomedical and health informatics, engineering, knowledge management, computational biology and translational informatics. Be a part of the Scientific Informatics Postdoctoral Research Fellow Program: The Scientific Informatics Postdoctoral Research Fellow Program aims to be a best-in-industry program for outstanding postdoctoral researchers, designed to provide a stimulating research environment, with access to challenging problems, massive data sets, and collaborations with teams of talented professionals from many different disciplines. With the resources, reach, and expertise of a large pharmaceutical company, postdoctoral researchers will be positioned to excel in an institution committed to breakthrough innovation in research and discovery. Position Overview: As a Postdoctoral Fellow - Translational and Health Informatics (Discovery Medicine), in Scientific Informatics, you will work with a highly collaborative team of scientists from Informatics, Information Technology, Discovery Medicine, and Pharmacogenomics to develop a semi-automated framework in order to repurpose existing compounds and test them in the clinic for new indications. In this role, you will integrate various sources and ontologies for gene target, drug, and clinical phenotype data in order to support compound prioritization, and perform multi-disciplinary research applying data mining, sophisticated programming, and network analyses. Responsibilities will include developing and automating information pipelines/workflows for data integration, harmonization, pattern-matching analyses and/or visualization, and supporting reproducible computational research. This post-doctoral research fellowship will be an opportunity to develop and apply cutting edge informatics techniques to high impact applications from early drug discovery to the clinic. The term of employment for this position is 1 year. Qualifications Education:

• PhD or Doctorate Degree in Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, or other computational-intensive field (such as applied mathematics, engineering, statistics, machine learning) by August 2014.

Required:

• Hands-on experience in (1) data integration of various disparate data sources, (2) expertise in Matlab, R, SQL, and other programming languages (such as Python, Perl), (3) conducting enrichment analyses, and (4) expertise with visualization techniques and programs (such as Spotfire, advanced excel macros).
• Candidate must be motivated, a broad thinker of approaching problems in new ways, and an excellent communicator and team player.

Preferred:

• Some experience with human genetics (i.e. network analyses, connectivity map)
• Familiarity with clinical trials and human health data
• Experience with translational applications of human health and clinical data to support early drug discovery
• Track record of relevant publications and presentations
• Our employees are the key to our company’s success. We demonstrate our commitment to our employees by offering a competitive and valuable rewards program. Merck’s benefits are designed to support the wide range of goals, needs and lifestyles of our employees, and many of the people that matter the most in their lives. If you need an accommodation for the application process please email us at staffingaadar@merck.com .

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