Scientific Web Developer, Public Health Sciences

The Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of Virginia seeks a Scientific Web Developer for a position in a computational biology research group led by Nathan Sheffield.

The Web Developer will help support medical research with front-end web development using modern development technologies including React, JavaScript, and TypeScript. Our front-ends operate as stand-alone applications that communicate with Python back-ends built by our team using FastAPI and deployed in AWS Elastic Container Service. The Web Developer will be primarily responsible for front-end React development of user interfaces. They will also have opportunities to gain experience with back-end development, if desired.

About the Lab: The Databio group is an interdisciplinary and collaborative computational biology research group located in the Center for Public Health Genomics at UVA. We are also affiliated with the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics, Department of Public Health Sciences, the School of Data Science, the Cancer Center, and the Child Health Research Center at UVA.

Our research is at the interface of computation and biology, drawing on techniques in computer science, data science, bioinformatics, and machine learning, and applying them to biological questions in cancer, epigenetics, single-cell analysis, development, and genomics. We collect both novel data and public data and make use of UVA's high-performance cluster for computational approaches to biological questions.

Our biological questions are focused on understanding gene regulation and epigenetics in development and disease, such as cancer, atherosclerosis, and kidney disease. How does DNA encode regulatory networks that enable cellular differentiation? We rely on experimental data from sequencing-based epigenome experiments like ATAC-seq, bisulfite-seq, and ChIP-seq, and we use these data to study fundamental principles of regulatory DNA in human health.

We are building a team of intelligent, creative people who are interested in working together to accomplish great things. We collaborate extensively. We emphasize social coding, using GitHub to share code both within the group and so others can benefit from our work. We seek to write readable, reusable code and apply it to new biological questions. We challenge the norm in academic computational research of individual scientists writing isolated code, and instead push open, multi-author code development. If these topics excite you, please read more about our research interests, recent publications, and philosophy of open data.

The web developer will have two primary responsibilities:

• Develop front end user interfaces to biomedical research data, using React, JavaScript, and TypeScript.

• Contribute to web-based documentation, training materials, and user-oriented outreach to demonstrate how to use the lab's research products.

Minimum Qualifications:

• Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, MIS, Computer Engineering or related disciplineBachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Technology, Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, or a related discipline OR an equivalent combination of experience, education, and certifications.

• Experience: Less than one year of experience. Relevant experience may be considered in