Director, Translational Bioinformatics

The Role:

As part of our vision, Moderna is committed to invest in R&D to further expand our impact on patients. You will be part of a growing team in Clinical and Translational Computational Oncology in R&D. The group will be focused on mining the multi-omics data obtained from clinical samples, understanding how the data can explain, predicting clinical efficacy to Moderna therapies, and extrapolating from these observations to enable future Moderna therapies. It is our intention to expand the discovery process from pre-clinical studies into the realm of clinical investigation.

Reporting to the Executive Director of Clinical and Translational Computational Oncology, the Director will be a key leader on a high performing team responsible for understanding the clinical mechanisms of Moderna cancer therapies, from cancer vaccines to other types of immune engagers for the treatment of cancer. You will be an innovative and collaborative computational scientist with a broad expertise in clinical trials, translational analytics, deep skills in the area of mining genomics and understanding of oncogenic and immune-oncological mechanisms with high learning agility. In collaboration with Translational Medicine scientists, you will develop and apply computational methods to analyze large datasets coming from the clinical studies in Moderna’s oncology portfolio and publicly and commercially sources datasets. The candidate must thrive in a fast-paced environment with high expectations. Integrity, ability to share experimental issues and troubleshoot, curiosity, collaborative spirit, respect for people, exemplary work ethic and setting the bar high are key values to thrive in our Team.

Here’s What You Will Do:

• Foresee scientific questions that could address broad strategic needs of a program and conceive the needed plan to execute data generation and analyses to address those questions

• Create and use existing/ emerging computational approaches to analyze complex multimodal internal clinical and publicly available or commercial patient datasets in order to extract clinically actionable insights

• Drive and provide hands-on leadership for deep integrative analysis of complex multi-omics data across various data modalities and connect insights and observations to clinical endpoints

• Lead collaboration with internal groups at Moderna and work with external partners to solve problems using cutting-edge data visualization and analysis. Represent Moderna at conferences.

• Independently communicate findings to multiple parties and contribute to research publications through writing and fundamental contributions.

• Collaborate closely with Translational Medicine and Oncology scientists to ensure that data is effectively utilized for high level impact

Here’s What You’ll Bring to the Table:

Minimum Qualifications

• PhD plus 10 or more years of experience in a quantitative field (i.e., bioinformatics, computational/systems biology) within industry drug discovery and development setting

• Experience working on problems involving complex biological systems at high-resolution

• Experience analyzing genomics data from clinical trials in an industry setting

• Expert proficiency in at least one programming language

• Experience with the analysis of NGS data

• Experience with applying machine learning methods (ML/AI) to biological data

Preferred Skills

• Strong grounding in the state-of-the art with respect to single cell biology and computational analysis

• Ability to quickly conceive and implement custom computational methods and algorithms and apply them to large data sets

• Creative problem solver who seeks finding useful biologically relevant information in data

• Experience working in an applied biological field such as immunology, cancer, or immune-oncology

• Experience with mRNA therapies and LNP delivery technologies

• Experience with applying machine learning methods (ML/AI) to analyzing clinical images (i.e., H&E stains)

• Strong scientific background, including an understanding of molecular biology and NGS techniques

• Experience working with multiple sequence alignments and large sequence datasets

• Familiarity with common bioinformatics tools for NGS data analysis

• Ability to work both independently and collaboratively

• Proficiency with high performance computing, preferably on public clouds (i.e. AWS, GCP, Azure)

• Outstanding written and verbal communication skills, ability to work with colleagues from diverse scientific backgrounds and cultures

Moderna is pleased to provide you and your famil