Microbial Genomics Postdoctoral Fellow

What You Will Do

• Develop community genome and metadata standards for single-cell microeukaryotes, symbioses, and co-cultures.
• Collaborate with the Genomic Standards Consortium, JGI researchers, and external stakeholders to define reporting requirements for genome quality, provenance, organismal associations, and partner-genome linkage.
• Conduct targeted genome quality and metadata assessments to evaluate and refine standards.
• Create controlled vocabularies, metadata templates, reporting checklists, and submission guidelines.
• Identify reporting gaps and improve validation using representative JGI datasets.
• Develop reproducible computational workflows for genome analysis, metadata integration, and standards validation.
• Integrate genomic, functional, phylogenetic, environmental, and association data for cross-project comparisons and Data Lakehouse applications.
• Publish findings, present at scientific meetings, and share reusable workflows and resources with the research community.
• Support automation of data curation, metadata validation, and computational analyses for single-cell and co-culture genomic datasets.
• Prepare and present project updates, technical documentation, and reports at group and collaborator meetings.
• Contribute to user-facing documentation and approaches for discovering, comparing, and reusing association-aware genomic datasets in the JGI Data Lakehouse.

What We Are Looking For

• A recent Ph.D. (within the last 1-2 years) in Computational Biology, Bioinformatics, Microbiology, Molecular Biology, or a related discipline.
• Strong experience in analysis of microbial genomes and metagenomes, with a proven track record reflected in recent or pending publications.
• Strong programming experience in Python, C/C++, R, or related scientific computing languages.
• Experience with statistical modeling, algorithm development, or large-scale data analytics.
• Strong experience with UNIX utilities and filesystems.
• Strong experience with using standard bioinformatics tools and databases.
• Strong knowledge of Biology/Biochemistry and understanding of key and complex biological concepts (e.g., genes, pathways, microbial phylogeny, and genome evolution).
• Strong organizational skills including experience maintaining detailed and accurate records of results and analyzed data.
• Excellent oral and written communication skills including experience presenting at group meetings and conferences, and publishing research findings.
• Demonstrated interpersonal communication skills including experience conducting independent, data-driven research and collaborating with an interdisciplinary research team.

Desired Qualifications

• Experience with single-cell genomics, microbial eukaryotes, co-cultures, symbioses, or genome-resolved metagenomics.
• Familiarity with Genomic Standards Consortium initiatives, community metadata standards, FAIR data principles, or data infrastructure.
• Machine learning/AI expertise.
• Demonstrated ability to accurately and eloquently represent and promote scientific projects to audiences of diverse technical backgrounds.