Postdoc - Gene Regulation in Hematopoiesis

**The Institute**

The Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) is an international biomedical research institute of excellence, based in Barcelona, Spain, with more than 400 scientists from 44 countries. The CRG is composed by an interdisciplinary, motivated and creative scientific team which is supported both by a flexible and efficient administration and by high-end and innovative technologies.

In April 2021, the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) received the renewal of the 'HR Excellence in Research' Award from the European Commission. This is a recognition of the Institute's commitment to developing an HR Strategy for Researchers, designed to bring the practices and procedures in line with the principles of the European Charter for Researchers and the Code of Conduct for the Recruitment of Researchers (Charter and Code).

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**The role**

The Single Cell and Synthetic Genomics of Blood Formation lab (PI: Lars Velten) at CRG Barcelona is looking for a motivated computational or mixed computational - experimental postdoc to use synthetic enhancers, CRISPR screening and computational approaches to unravel the logic of gene regulation in blood stem cell differentiation.

Blood formation is an essential, biomedically highly relevant, and complex process of cellular differentiation. Our group studies adult hematopoiesis using computational biology, single cell genomics (Velten et al., 2017, Beneyto-Calabuig et al., 2023, Scherer et al., biorxiv), and genetic screens (Schraivogel et al., 2020). In the past four years, we have established a research line using fully synthetic DNA constructs to understand how hematopoietic stem cells transform continuous transcription factor gradients into cell state specific gene expression patterns, and to engineer artificial, cell state specific hematopoietic enhancers from scratch (Frömel et al., biorxiv). In our primary hematopoietic stem cell expansion and differentiation system, we screen the cell-state specific activity of 10,000s of synthetic enhancers, alone or in combination with CRISPR perturbations of transcriptional regulators, using bulk and single cell readouts.

In your new role, you would
- Develop a project on gene regulation in the blood forming system
- Analyze data from synthetic enhancer MPRA screens, single cell MPRA screens and dual MPRA-CRISPR screens
- Design experiments using these technologies, and collaborate with an experienced technician to implement these experiments
- Interact closely with both wetlab and computational scientists from the group
- Serve as senior member of the team and, down the road, co-supervisor of PhD students or technical staff

Your work would be part of the project “Artificial Intelligence for Synthetic Genomics of Blood”, funded with a prestigious ERC Starting Grant. A 45 seconds video summary of that grant is available online.

**About the l**ab**

My interdisciplinary group investigates the biology of hematopoietic stem cells using a combination of single cell genomics, genetic screens, and computational biology. We strive to develop novel genomic and bioinformatic tools to answer longstanding questions in the field. In particular, we cover two main research lines, a) Gene regulation in healthy hematopoiesis) and b) Clonal function in ageing and disease. The lab has been established in January 2020 and currently consists of six members: Two PhD students, two bridging postdocs, one postdoc, and two senior technicians. We have received funding from the European Commission, the Spanish and German government, the Spanish Association Against Cancer and the European Hematology Association.

**Whom** would we like to hire?**

**Professional experience**

**Must Have**
- You hold a PhD in a relevant field (computational biology, genomics, molecular biology, bioinformatics, biotechnology etc.)
- You have demonstrated your ability to lead a challenging research project
- You have published at least one primary research paper during your PhD
- You have strong experience in the analysis of non-standard genomics data (e.g. Perturb-Seq, CRISPR screens, Nanopore, custom RNA-seq protocols etc)
- Experience in both exploratory and formal data analysis
- You have strong programming skills in R or python
- You embrace data-driven research and are willing to collaborate with computational biologists

**Desirable but not required/ Nice to have**
- You have, in addition to your computational training, training in experimental work (e.g. cell culture, flow cytometry, cloning, library preparation etc.)
- A strong foundation in machine learning and statistics
- You have experience with deep learning environments such as tensorflow and pytorch

**Education and training**
- A PhD in a relevant field (biochemistry, biomedicine, molecular biology, genetics, etc.)

**Languages**
- You are proficient in English

**Technical skills**
- Genomics data analysis
- R and python

**Competences**
- Success-driven
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