PhD position in bioinformatics at the Center for Human Genetics

PhD position in bioinformatics, next-generation sequencing, and cancer genomics at the Center for Human Genetics, KULeuven

The Laboratory of Computational Biology together with the Laboratory for Molecular Pathogenesis of Leukemia have a joint position for a motivated PhD student interested in genomics and systems biology of cancer.

Research project
The PhD research will focus on high-throughput approaches to further decipher the leukemia genome and to identify novel oncogenic mutations or structural variations that may underlie tumorigenesis. Secondary interest goes out to variations in transcriptional networks and the characterization of the underlying cis-regulatory variations.

Available data include gene expression microarray data, GS FLX sequence data of candidate gene sets, and may even include full genome sequence data of multiple cancer patients.

The challenge of this project is to handle large amounts of public and in-house genomic data and to use, benchmark, and develop state-of-the- art bioinformatics approaches, while maintaining a clear focus on important biological questions.

Profile
Master in Engineering, Bioinformatics, Computer Science, Bio-engineering, or equivalent.

The candidate we are seeking should have basic programming or bioinformatics skills, with a strong interest in high-throughput technologies and genomics. Having any of the following skills is a plus: linux, R/Bioconductor, Matlab, Perl, Java, MySQL, data mining, clustering, classification, modeling, (bio)statistics, genome browsers.

Environment
The successful applicant will be hosted by the Laboratory of Computational Biology, headed by Prof. Stein Aerts, and will be in close collaboration with The Laboratory
for Molecular Pathogenesis of Leukemia, headed by Prof. Jan Cools. Both labs are part of the Center for Human Genetics at the KULeuven.

Contact
Interested? Send your CV and motivation letter to stein.aerts@ med.kuleuven. be