Position title: Postdoctoral Research Fellow - Bioinformatics
Employer: Centre for Microbiome Research, QUT
Closing date: August 25, 2022
Brief position description: The successful applicant will undertake bioinformatic research to determine how microbial communities are changing at the strain-level in response to global climate change. This effort will develop novel “big data” approaches, using the increasingly massive quantity of public metagenome data available to inform pan-genome analyses, complemented by short and long read sequencing technologies. This research program will build upon significant the expertise and tools available at CMR (e.g. https://research.qut.edu.au/cmr/software) and work in concert with other bioinformatics-focused post-doctoral fellows and students. It is anticipated that methods developed will become widely used in microbial ecology and result in high impact publications, and that their application in thawing permafrost ecosystems will drive our understanding of microbial feedbacks to climate change.
The successful candidate will work as part of a USA government funded project “EMergent Ecosystem Response to ChanGE Biology Integration Institute” (https://emerge-bii.github.io/). The appointees’ primary role will be to assist in developing novel bioinformatic techniques and applying these workflows to the project’s large datasets (e.g. >4Tbp of metagenomes).
Analyses will focus on understand ecosystem-climate feedbacks in Stordalen Mire, a thawing permafrost peatland in arctic Sweden. Rapid warming in the Arctic is driving permafrost thaw, and new availability of formerly-frozen soil carbon for cycling and release to the atmosphere, representing a potentially large but poorly constrained accelerant of climate change.
Contact name: Isabelle Krippner
Contact email: cmr.admin@qut.edu.au