Scientific Director - Bioinformatician

At Lilly, we unite caring with discovery to make life better for people around the world. We are a global healthcare leader headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana. Our employees around the world work to discover and bring life-changing medicines to those who need them, improve the understanding and management of disease, and give back to our communities through philanthropy and volunteerism. We give our best effort to our work, and we put people first. We’re looking for people who are determined to make life better for people around the world.

At Lilly, we provide "Answers that Matter" through innovative medicines, and exceptional service that enable people to live healthier and longer. Lilly Biotechnology Discovery Research center (BioTDR) builds on over 25 years' expertise and has track record of delivering life-changing biotherapeutics. The computational science group within BioTDR strives to apply state-of-the-art computational approaches to enable next-generation biologics for unmet medical needs. We drive innovation by integrating bioinformatics insights, ML/AI and physics-based modeling approaches into discovery process to solve challenging problems and to enable intractable targets.

We are actively seeking a high caliber, senior bioinformatician to lead and drive our bioinformatics core function, and to accelerate the discovery of novel biologics - antibody, protein, peptide and beyond. This role requires outstanding competencies of bioinformatics, with deep domain expertise in high-throughput next-generation sequencing (NGS), antibody repertoire, and protein structural analysis, applied to novel protein discovery research.

Responsibilities

• Develop and implement NGS based algorithms and workflows to enable biologics discovery and engineering decisions (e.g. developability, specificity, activity).

• Partner with multidisciplinary teams of diverse background. Apply interactive and iterative bioinformatics analysis to validate and optimize molecules through in silico, in vitro, and in vivo assays.

• Create data visualization methods and analysis standards to communicate bioinformatics-derived scientific insights clearly and effectively at project meetings; promote data-driven decision making.

• Mentor and provide technical leadership to a team of bioinformaticians.

• Continuously review scientific literature to scout new technologies and scientific advances, including deep learning-based methods. Conceptualize, design, and implement with help of junior staff.

• Actively engage in the external environment and contribute to the field through scientific publications and presentations.

This role will be embedded in Lilly’s Medicines Innovation Hub (MIH), which serves as leading-edge scientific unit working across all disease areas to identify and develop quality targets, hits, leads, and drug candidates.

Basic Qualifications

• PhD in Bioinformatics, structural bioinformatics, computational biology, or similar field, with minimum 5 years of relevant experience in protein drug discovery and development.

• Experience in bioinformatics software and scripting languages (e.g., Python, R).

Additional Skills and Preferences:

• Industry bioinformatics experience.

• Proficient knowledge and hands-on experience on high-throughput NGS, immune repertoire analysis (e.g. IMGT, OAS, NCBI, UniProt), contemporary bioinformatics tools, data mining techniques, and structural modeling (e.g. PyMol, MOE, PDB, QSAR).

• Solid understanding of principles of antibody/protein stability, solubility, immunogenicity, aggregation potential, chemical and other manufacturing liabilities, as well as industry standard methods, and computational approaches (including commercial software offerings) for evaluation of the above.

• Data visualization expertise, and proven track record of contributing to and helping advance multi-disciplinary team projects.

• Demonstrated ability to derive insights from high-dimensional data with complex patterns using statistical learning approaches using readable, reproducible, and efficient code.

• Excellent written and oral communication skills, including an ability to explain complex ideas to experimentalists, protein engineers and biologists.

• Strong collaborative skills and proven ability to work with a cross-functional team.

• Leadership skills and experience leading teams.

• Relevant publications or scientific contributions in the field of bioinformatics.

• Competent knowledge of protein drug discovery, research, and development processes in a biotechnology or pharmaceutical industry setting.

Additional Information

• Location: San Diego, CA

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