Sr Bioinformatics Scientist

Sr Bioinformatics Scientist

Children's National Hospital

Pay Range

$118,393.60/yr - $197,308.80/yr

Role Overview

The Senior Bioinformatics Scientist, serving as Assistant Director of the BTI Bioinformatics Core, provides scientific and technical leadership. The role is split 50% scientific oversight, project guidance, and code review, and 50% hands‑on computational biology analyses for the Rare Brain Tumor Program. The ideal candidate demonstrates deep technical expertise, collaborative leadership, and a commitment to open, reproducible science, with substantial pediatric oncology genomics experience, strong biological insight, and the ability to guide multiple PIs’ research programs.

Responsibilities

• Provide scientific and technical leadership as the Core’s primary expert for methodological guidance, code standards, QC frameworks, and pipeline development.
• Mentor Bioinformatics Scientists and support Core infrastructure.
• Lead the development and implementation of novel and optimized workflows for large‑scale -omic datasets.
• Design rigorous statistical frameworks that align with study goals and clinical hypotheses.
• Serve as technical advisor to junior bioinformatics staff, providing design, optimization, and troubleshooting support.
• Lead preparation of figures, written analysis, and supplemental methods for manuscripts, grants, and collaborators.
• Coordinate timelines and deliverables using project management tools (e.g., Jira, GitHub Projects, Asana) and collaborative workflows.
• Represent the organization in consortia, workshops, and national/international scientific forums.
• Guide institutional practices in reproducibility, open science compliance, and infrastructure sustainability.

Qualifications

• Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in a biological or computational discipline.
• 8–15 years of relevant experience in applied bioinformatics, genomics, and computational work (inclusive of doctoral work).
• Advanced proficiency in UNIX/Linux environments.
• Expert‑level programming and data analysis skills in R, Python, or equivalent.
• Deep experience with NGS, microarray, multi‑omics, and other high‑throughput platforms and their application to specific biological questions.
• Expertise with a broad range of bioinformatics tools, pipelines, and genomic databases (e.g., GATK, UCSC Genome Browser, Bioconductor, ENCODE, NCBI, Kids First, gnomAD, ClinVar, OMIM, HGMD, and COSMIC).
• Demonstrated expertise in GitHub, containerization (Docker, Podman, and/or Singularity), and workflow automation.
• Strong grasp of workflow management tools (e.g., Snakemake, Nextflow, WDL, CWL).
• Expertise using high‑performance computing (HPC) environments and/or cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Google Cloud) for large‑scale analyses.
• Ability to develop user‑facing bioinformatics applications using tools such as RShiny or Python Streamlit.
• Demonstrated ability to design and execute robust statistical analyses across diverse genomic and proteomic data types.
• Deep domain expertise in at least one disease area or biological system through publications, pipelines, tools, and/or open‑source contributions.
• Experience writing scientific manuscripts, figure and methods development, and manuscript authorship.
• Strong mentorship skills and demonstrated ability to train junior scientists and analysts.
• Excellent organizational, communication, and presentation skills.
• Commitment to open and team science practices, including transparency, reproducibility, shared documentation, and collaborative problem‑solving.
• Familiarity with project management tools and methodologies such as Scrum, Agile, Jira, GitHub Projects, Trello, or Asana.

Location

District of Columbia – Washington, DC

Work Schedule

Full‑time, 40 hours per week, day shift

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