Bioinformatics Research Scientist (TIRTL Collaborative Center)

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Position Overview

The Tracking the Immune Repertoire of Tumor Lymphocytes (TIRTL) Bluesky program in the Host–Microbe Interactions Department at St. Jude supports multiple institutional research and clinical programs focused on immune repertoire profiling. Building on the foundational TIRTL‑seq (Pogorelyy and Kirk et al., Nature Methods 2025) method, we provide cohort scale T cell and B cell receptor (TCR and BCR) sequencing, enabling research in cancer immunology, infectious disease, and antibody discovery across the institution.

We are seeking a Bioinformatics Research Scientist to play a key role in developing, maintaining, and scaling robust computational pipelines that support high-throughput immune repertoire sequencing and antibody discovery across cancer and infectious disease programs. This individual will work closely with experimental scientists, clinicians, and data science teams to deliver reproducible, production-ready analyses as part of a centralized service.

Job Responsibilities:

• Independently perform basic and advanced level statistical analysis, algorithm implementation, programming from a variety of biotechnology platforms, and oversee quality check.
• Design and prepare materials and courses for training on various bioinformatics software and databases, computing, data mining, and analysis.
• Act as a liaison between end-users, software developers, system designers, and different departments.
• Establish protocols or best practices for common research tasks and SOP, evaluate products and solutions to make recommendations, and integrate solutions.
• Lead the development, implementation, installation, and maintenance of databases; coordinate data collection, database implementation, and usage and any hardware and software related to database collection.
• Develop programs to assist in the analysis of data within the databases.
• Assist in planning, coordinating, and organizing projects across departments and delegate tasks based on priority, expertise, and capacity.
• Perform other duties as assigned to meet the goals and objectives of the department and institution.
• Maintains regular and predictable attendance.

• Develop and maintain bioinformatics pipelines for TCR and BCR repertoire sequencing.
• Perform and oversee data QC, statistical analysis, and interpret repertoire datasets.
• Integrate immune repertoire data with clinical metadata and other multi-omics datasets.
• Document and maintain workflows and databases to ensure reproducibility, scalability, and long-term data and code reuse.
• Support infectious disease and host–microbe interaction studies, with emphasis on B cell responses and antibody discovery.
• Support immuno-oncology projects, including analysis of tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes and integration with tumor genomic and clinical data.
• Collaborate with investigators and serve as a technical liaison between wet-lab, clinical, and computational teams.
• Contribute to continuous improvement and expansion of TIRTL analytical capabilities.

Preferred skills:

• Experience with immune repertoire analysis (BCR and/or TCR).
• Familiarity with tools and methods for BCR clonotyping, somatic hypermutation analysis, lineage reconstruction, or antigen-driven selection.
• Background in cancer immunology, infectious disease, or antibody discovery.

Minimum Education and/or Training:

• Bachelor's degree in bioinformatics, cheminformatics, statistics/computer science (with a background in biological sciences or chemistry) or related field.
• Master's degree or PhD preferred.

Minimum Experience:

• Minimum Requirement: Bachelor's degree with 6+ years of relevant post-degree work in bioinformatics, cheminformatics, statistics/computer science (with a background in biological sciences or chemistry).
• Experience Exception: Master's degree with 4+ years of relevant post-degree experience (OR) PhD with no experience.
• Experience in at least one programming or scripting language and at least one statistical package, with R preferred.

• Significant experience in at least one programming or scripting language and at least one statistical package, with python/R preferred.
• Strong experience with high-throughput sequencing data analysis.
• Experience with Linux, hpc environments, version control and workflow systems.

Compensation

In recognition of certain U.S. state and municipal pay transparency laws, St. Jude is including a reasonable estimate of the compensation range for this role. This is an estimate offered in good faith and a specific salary offer takes into account factors that are considered in making compensation decisions including but not limited to skill sets, experience and training, licensure and certifications, and other business and organizational needs. It is not typical for an individual to be hired at or near the top of the salary range and compensation decisions are dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case. A reasonable estimate of the current salary range is $86,320 - $154,960 per year for the role of Bioinformatics Research Scientist (TIRTL Collaborative Center).

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