Post-Doctoral Research Fellow – Leek Lab Full-time

Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center is an independent, nonprofit organization providing adult cancer treatment and groundbreaking research focused on cancer and infectious diseases. Based in Seattle, Fred Hutch is the only National Cancer Institute-designated cancer center in Washington.

With a track record of global leadership in bone marrow transplantation, HIV/AIDS prevention, immunotherapy and COVID-19 vaccines, Fred Hutch has earned a reputation as one of the world’s leading cancer, infectious disease and biomedical research centers. Fred Hutch operates eight clinical care sites that provide medical oncology, infusion, radiation, proton therapy and related services, and network affiliations with hospitals in five states. Together, our fully integrated research and clinical care teams seek to discover new cures to the world’s deadliest diseases and make life beyond cancer a reality.

At Fred Hutch we value collaboration, compassion, determination, excellence, innovation, integrity and respect. Our mission is directly tied to the humanity, dignity and inherent value of each employee, patient, community member and supporter. Our commitment to learning across our differences and similarities make us stronger. We seek employees who bring different and innovative ways of seeing the world and solving problems.

The Fred Hutch Leek Lab/Research Group is involved in large, education focused initiatives and biomedical research funded by NIH grants. These projects involve delivering training materials to researchers to help catalyze their work in a scalable manner, as well as innovating new methods for understanding or treating disease.  A postdoctoral researcher in this position will assist with projects in a variety of education driven capacities, participate in pedagogical research and evaluation, as well as have the opportunity to leverage AI to contribute to biomedical cancer research studies.

Our key projects include:

• Primary research using AI and other statistical methods to better personalize treatment of cancer patients from large-scale data.
• Outreach, education, and user research initiatives for the NHGRI Genomic Data Science Analysis, Visualization, and Informatics Lab-Space, or AnVIL, which provides a cloud environment for the analysis of large genomic and related datasets.
• The Open Case Studies project (opencasestudies.org) is focused on creating complete data analysis guides using real-world data. These are used by universities and high schools around the world to help learners better understand the decision-making process involved in data science.

Additional projects may include:

• The Informatics Technology for Cancer Research (ITCR) Training Network (ITN (itcrtraining.org), a collaborative effort that supports cancer informatics and data science training through resources, technology, and events.
• Data Science for Environmental Health, DaSEH, which trains environmental health practitioners in R programming.
• Genomics Education Modules, GEMs, which develops entry-level genomics education modules specifically for community college partners.
• Developing statistical methods to utilize public data in a reproducible manner.

Position can been be fully remote: 

Specifically, the postdoc will have the following duties:

• Help create, maintain, and review online informatics training courses and curricula.
• Teach short form informatics training workshops for researchers, which will often involve travel.
• Collaborate with internal and external investigators and students to create training materials.
• Identify and document software bugs with the education related software used for creating courses (ottrproject.org).
• Develop new statistical models leveraging public and investigator collected high throughput data.
• Write new R packages or Shiny Apps for implementation of developed methodology.
• Apply AI and ML tools (including Python, R, and possibly other languages) to test and evaluate biomedical hypotheses.
• Develop benchmarks and work together with staff to evaluate algorithms on those benchmarks.
• Contribute to writing papers and reviewing current literature.

MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS:

• A PhD in biomedical sciences, epidemiology, biostatistics, statistics, computer science, machine learning, or another related statistical or computational discipline
• Creative, thoughtful, and a communicative collaborator
• Familiarity with R, R packages, and RMarkdown
• Experience with version control using GitHub
• A willingness to learn and teach new informatics content
• A careful writer and diligent editor
• Willingness and ability to travel, potentially on a quarterly basis
• Experience with statistics and machine learning

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:

• Experience with Quarto, Python, and/or other programming languages
• Experience and interest in data science or informatics education
• Experience working with clinical data
• Experience with deep learning applications for biomedical research

The annual base salary range for this position is from $77,976 to $95,014, and pay offered will be based on experience and qualifications.

Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center offers employees a comprehensive benefits package designed to enhance health, well-being, and financial security. Benefits include medical/vision, dental, flexible spending accounts, life, disability, retirement, family life support, employee assistance program, onsite health clinic, tuition reimbursement, paid vacation (22 days per year), paid sick leave (up to 30 calendar days per occurrence of a qualifying reason), paid holidays (up to 13 days per year), paid parental leave (up to 4 weeks), and partially paid sabbatical leave (up to 12 months for professor track faculty, up to 6 months for other scientific staff).