Employment Opportunities at NESCent

Computer Project Manager (Systems Administrator)

The Computer Project Manager (Systems Administrator) is a core member of the Informatics team at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center.  The Center provides a world-class facility for data and computation-intensive science.  The incumbent:

  • provides system administration support for the computational infrastructure of the Center, including wired and wireless network infrastructure, computer hardware and software, virtual machine-hosted servers, network file storage, and backup and restore systems;
  • oversees a suite of electronic collaboration support services and systems (including file shares, wiki farm, and mailing lists), relational database management software (MySQL, PostgreSQL), application servers and web-application frameworks (JBoss, Tomcat, Django, Ruby on Rails), and scientific software programs; and
  • serves as an IT liaison to Center scientists and staff, to IT units within Duke University, and to collaborators on special projects at other institutions.

This position reports to NESCent’s Assistant Director for Informatics, and is currently funded until December 2014. Continued employment after that is contingent on availability of funding.

Responsibilities

Systems administration (80%)

  • Assess the systems support needs of the center’s end-users, including resident and remote sponsored scientists, staff and administration. Develop procedures and services that can meet those needs, including service level standards.  Define, manage, and execute larger-scale IT system projects from inception to rollout and wrap-up.
  • Maintain the integrity, performance and security of the center’s software and hardware infrastructure. Ensure continuing quality assessment and improvement of center hardware and software systems. Services include, but are not limited to websites, databases, collaboration tools, wireless networking, videoconferencing, mailing lists, user accounts, high-performance computing clusters, file storage/backup systems, and specialized scientific software systems.
  • Administer a heterogeneous IT environment of different operating systems (Windows, MacOSX, Linux), as well as primarily open-source electronic collaboration support systems, application serving and deployment frameworks, and scientific computing resources. Protect the integrity of production systems and monitor their operational status.
  • Provide emergency response to unexpected service downtimes and security breaches.
  • Deploy, manage and optimize performance of relational database management software.
  • Create and manage user accounts with different levels of privileges.
  • Assist center leadership through planning, consultation, and reporting, including projection of IT equipment and software budgets.

IT liaison (20%)

  • Serve as liaison with the Duke University, College of Arts and Sciences, and Department of Biology IT units to ensure that the center takes full advantage of available resources and that central IT staff are aware of NESCent’s needs.
  • Serve as the liaison between Center scientists requiring high-performance computing resources/training and the relevant staff at Duke and other institutions.
  • Research and share skills and knowledge regarding best practices and relevant technologies with the other members of the center informatics staff, and with other Center staff and scientists where appropriate.

Education

Required: Degree in information technology or related field OR 5 years relevant experience OR some relevant combination thereof. 
Preferred: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Information Technology or a related field.

Experience

Required: 

  • Professional experience administering medium to large heterogeneous IT system environments.  Experience should include Unix (specifically Linux), MacOSX, and Windows operating systems; web and application servers; relational database management systems; provision of and continuous monitoring of production-level services and applications; backup-and-restore systems for desktops as well as servers; and building, installing, and configuring open-source research-grade software.
  • Professional experience securing and hardening networks, servers, and software application deployments.
  • Professional experience creating, configuring, and managing virtual machines and file storage in private or commercial cloud computing environments.
  • Working knowledge of how to use scripting languages, such as Python, Perl, or bash, for task automation.
  • Demonstrable commitment to a high level of excellence, customer service orientation, process documentation, and adherence to current and emerging best practices. Experience with independently managing and executing IT projects through all stages of the project lifecycle, including estimating effort, and setting and meeting deadlines. 
  • Proven ability to work in and collaborate with a team of IT professionals, as well as to thrive in a dynamic environment interacting with a variety of clients. Excellent interpersonal and communication skills.
Preferred:
  • Experience in working in scientific or higher-education institutions, including direct support of domain scientists.
  • Working knowledge and experience with web content management systems (such as Wordpress, MediaWiki, Drupal) and PHP. Experience with managing Wiki (specifically MediaWiki) and mailing list farms.
  • Knowledge of systems and technologies for Single Sign-On and federated authentication and authorization systems, in particular Shibboleth and OpenID.
  • Experience in a professionally managed helpdesk support environment.

Working Conditions

Standard office work environment. Must be able to occasionally lift 50 pounds and unpack, shelve and shift computer hardware.  Will require on call availability outside of regular business hours to respond to server and network infrastructure emergencies Occasional on-site presence on weekends to support special events. These statements are intended to describe the general nature and level of work being performed by the employee in this position. They are not intended to be construed as an exhaustive list of all responsibilities, duties, and skills required of a person in this position.

How to Apply

Please contact Hilmar Lapp (hlapp@nescent.org) for inquiries. Applications should be sent to Hilmar Lapp and include a cover letter, CV, and three references. For further information about NESCent and its Informatics program please see the NESCent website, and the NESCent Informatics wiki.

Postdoctoral fellow: Bioinformatics, Phenotypes

We are recruiting a postdoc with training in bioinformatics who is interested in studying phenotypic evolution by combining model organism genetic data with comparative anatomical data from throughout the vertebrates.

One of the biggest challenges in systems biology is the inclusion of whole organism phenotypes.  In the Phenoscape group, we have developed ontology-based methods for representing phenotypes of diverse species in order to integrate them with model organism developmental and genetic data,. We have collected these data in a sophisticated Knowledgebase, which has an initial focus on the diversity of phenotypes in ostariophysan fish, including zebrafish (kb.phenoscape.org). We are currently scaling up our approach to the vertebrates as a whole, with a goal of allowing similarities to be identified between phenotypes from sources as diverse as dinosaur fossils and mouse knockout mutants.  

We invite postdoctoral applicants to propose an independent project that uses the Phenoscape Knowledgebase as a research platform.  In particular, we are interested in projects that will leverage functional genomic data to study the evolution of whole-organism phenotype in nonmodel organisms.  

The postdoc will work under the direction of Paula Mabee (University of South Dakota) and Todd Vision (University of North Carolina), as part of a distributed, multidisciplinary team that includes evolutionary biologists, computer scientists, model organism experts, and bioinformaticists.   It will be based in South Dakota, with opportunities to travel to other sites, including the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent), the University of Chicago, and the California Academy of Sciences.

Starting date: This two year postdoctoral position is available to be filled as early as September 2012.

Required qualifications

  • Ph.D. degree with strong background in bioinformatics;
  • Preferred previous experience in one of the following: ontologies, functional genomics, developmental biology
  • Demonstrated communication and writing skills, in English
  • Demonstrated ability to work in a team setting

How to apply

Please contact Dr. Mabee (pmabee@usd.edu) for inquiries. Applications should be directed to Dr. Mabee and include a cover letter, CV, a brief statement detailing your research interests and career goals, and three letters of reference.

For more information, please see the Phenoscape Site and Knowledgebase.