King's College London

About Us

The Bioinformatician will join the translational cancer immunology research group led by Professor Sheeba Irshad at King’s College London, supporting a portfolio of integrated translational and clinical research programmes focused on breast cancer biology, tumour immunology, treatment resistance and precision oncology. The post holder will contribute to multiple ongoing translational research initiatives across the Irshad laboratory.

Working closely with clinical, translational and computational collaborators across King’s College London, Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust and the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR), the post holder will support integration and analysis of complex clinical and multi-omic datasets generated through translational studies and experimental medicine programmes.

About The Role

A key component of the role will involve development and maintenance of integrated clinical and translational research datasets, linking clinical metadata with high-dimensional molecular profiling platforms including single-cell transcriptomics, spatial transcriptomics, spatial proteomics, flow and mass cytometry, and multiplex imaging datasets.

The role offers an exciting opportunity to work at the interface of cancer immunology, translational oncology and computational biology within a highly collaborative and multidisciplinary research environment.

Key responsibilities of the role are to develop, maintain and analyse integrated clinical and translational research datasets linking anonymised clinical metadata with high-dimensional molecular profiling data.

There will be a requirement to design and implement computational pipelines for analysis of complex multi-omic datasets, with particular emphasis on:

• single-cell and bulk RNA sequencing
• spatial transcriptomics and spatial proteomics
• flow and mass cytometry
• multiplex imaging and related spatial biology platforms

It will be required to Integrate clinical and experimental datasets to support patient stratification, biomarker discovery and investigation of mechanisms underpinning treatment resistance and tumour–immune interactions. Contribute to development and maintenance of reproducible computational workflows and data analysis pipelines across the laboratory.

A key component will be to liaise with bioinformatics collaborators at King’s College London and the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) to support harmonised analytical approaches and data standards and evaluate and implement emerging computational methods and open-source tools relevant to translational cancer biology and spatial omics.

This is a full time post (35 Hours per week), and you will be offered a fixed term contract until 31/07/2028.

About You

To be successful in this role, we are looking for candidates to have the following skills and experience:

Essential criteria

1. PhD  in Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Cancer Genomics, Data Science or a related quantitative biological discipline
2. Excellent communication skills, with the ability to present complex computational and biological data clearly to both computational and non-computational audiences
3. Demonstrated expertise in analysis of high-dimensional translational datasets, with particular experience in single-cell and spatial transcriptomic technologies and/or multiplex imaging platforms
4. Strong proficiency in statistical modelling and programming using R and/or Python
5. Strong experience using computational frameworks for single-cell and spatial omics analysis, including tools such as Seurat, Scanpy, Bioconductor and related spatial analysis platforms
6. Experience integrating clinical and translational molecular datasets for biomarker discovery, patient stratification or translational cancer research applications
7. Ability to work independently and contribute intellectually to translational study design, data interpretation and hypothesis generation within multidisciplinary teams 

Desirable criteria

1. Knowledge of immunology, tumour microenvironment, or translational cancer research
2. Past peer-reviewed publication(s) that involves the analysis of genomics NGS data or bulk/single-cell transcriptomics data or CyTOF data
3. Experience in pipeline scripting, automation and management in HPC clusters
4. Ability to analyse data with existing publicly available and commercial software solutions (e.g. R/Bioconductor, UMAP, viSNE, SPADE, FlowJo, CytoBank suite)Knowledge of breast histopathology and breast cancer animal models.

Downloading a copy of our Job Description

Full details of the role and the skills, knowledge and experience required can be found in the Job Description document, provided at the bottom of the next page after you click “Apply Now”. This document will provide information of what criteria will be assessed at each stage of the recruitment process.

Please note that this is a PhD level role but candidates who have submitted their thesis and are awaiting award of their PhDs will be considered. In these circumstances the appointment will be made at Grade 5, spine point 30 with the title of Research Assistant. Upon confirmation of the award of the PhD, the job title will become Research Associate and the salary will increase to Grade 6. 

Further Information

We pride ourselves on being inclusive and welcoming. We embrace diversity and want everyone to feel that they belong and are connected to others in our community.

We are committed to working with our staff and unions on these and other issues, to continue to support our people and to develop a diverse and inclusive culture at King's. We ask all candidates to submit a copy of their CV, and a supporting statement, detailing how they meet the essential criteria listed in the advert. If we receive a strong field of candidates, we may use the desirable criteria to choose our final shortlist, so please include your evidence against these where possible.

To find out how our managers will review your application, please take a look at our ‘How we Recruit'’ pages.