Fulbright Postdoctoral Scholarship

The Australian-American Fulbright Commission is pleased to offer a brand new postdoctoral opportunity with Washington State University (WSU). This award will enable postdoctoral researchers to undertake collaborative projects at WSU in pan-transcriptome assembly, annotation and analysis. The candidate for this opportunity should come from a Bioinformatics/Computational Biology background.

Pan-Transcriptome Assembly, Annotation and Analysis

The central dogma of molecular genetics – “DNA makes RNA makes protein” – clearly defines the role of transcriptome in bridging genome and phenome. To date, national and/or international collaborations have been initiated to assemble pan-genomes, pan-epigenomes and pan-chromatin architectures of agriculturally important animals. Pan-transcriptome, however, remain largely unexplored. No doubt, it is imperative for us to develop the farm animal pan-transcriptome resources because they are keys to identify functional elements hidden in the pan-genomes, pan-epigenomes and pan-chromatin architectures. This scholarship represents an opportunity for a talented postdoctoral fellow to help advance pan-transcriptome assembly, annotation and analysis.

The Opportunity

The scholar’s major responsibility is to develop, design and implement bioinformatic pipelines, computational models and artificial intelligence systems to understand how genome to phenome events are bridged by RNA variants (isoforms) and thus delineate the complex and multivariate relationships between animals’ genomes and phenomes. These factors – RNA macro-isoforms (length polymorphisms), micro-variants (RNA modification), expression abundance, time series, and tissue specificity should be taken into consideration to develop the pan transcriptome resources. The candidate should have strong experiences and skills in mathematics and/or computer sciences. She or he should demonstrate good understanding of biological problems and in-depth knowledge of computational methods for next-generation sequencing analysis.

Our aim is to encourage the scholar to lead formation of an international animal pan-transcriptome consortium and develop a white paper for publication in a high-impact journal. No doubt, there will be additional opportunities for the scholar to develop leadership skills, such as organizing skill development workshops, coordinating research activities, performing formal classroom teaching and training graduate and undergraduate students, for example. She or he will present our work at national and international conferences. In addition, she or he will prepare manuscripts for publication.

To discuss the project and obtain the required letter of invitation, please contact Dr. Zhihua Jiang, Professor of Genome Biology