Post Doctoral Scholar - Henn Lab

The Henn Laboratory is seeking a Postdoctoral Fellow to advance two integrated research programs: (1) selection-guided GWAS methods applied to underrepresented African populations, leveraging the Northern Cape Tuberculosis Cohort, and (2) inference of adaptive evolution at the HLA/MHC loci in admixed populations. The position involves active collaborations with Brown University and McGill University on the SWIF(r) machine learning toolkit for selection inference.

Key Responsibilities

* Build and maintain QC and variant-calling pipelines for next-generation genomic sequencing data

* Develop population-specific demographic models and encode parameters in stdpopsim format

* Train SWIF(r) per population and selection regime; integrate HLA summary statistics; compute posterior probability distributions

* Develop and validate HLA simulation framework (msprime/SLiM) for directional and balancing selection; release via GitHub

* Execute selection-guided GWAS for BMI, tuberculosis susceptibility, and skin pigmentation

* Lead peer-reviewed manuscript preparation and conference presentations

* PhD in evolutionary biology, statistical/human genetics, computational biology, or related field

* Experience with population genetic methods and large-scale genomic datasets (WGS, SNP arrays)

* Proficiency in Python and/or R; comfort in Unix/Linux computing environments

* Peer-reviewed publication(s) or manuscripts in preparation

* Familiarity with positive selection statistics (iHS, XP-EHH) or demographic inference tools (msprime, SMC++)

* Experience with HLA nomenclature, or software development for open-source release

• 2-4 letters of reference required

From dissertation committee member/ or close collaborators.

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