Postdoctoral Research Position - $50k/yr

Large Scale Phylogenetic Data Selection, Data Assembly, and Tree Reconstruction for the Plant Tree of Life

A 2-year postdoctoral position is available for algorithm and parallel program development associated with reconstructing the green plant tree of life. The position is sponsored by the iPlant Collaborative (http://iplantcollaborative.org), which is supporting cyberinfrastructure across the plant sciences.

This position will be shared between the Dunn Lab at Brown University (Casey Dunn, casey_dunn@brown.edu, http://www.brown.edu/Faculty/Dunn_Lab/) and the Exelixis Lab at the Technical University of Munich, Germany (Alexandros Stamatakis, stamatak@cs.tum.edu, http://wwwkramer.in.tum.de/exelixis/).

The specific scientific focus will be on data selection and pre-filtering, data assembly and large-scale tree reconstruction algorithms, including application of high performance computing methods. The successful candidate will also pursue the development and implementation of new summary statistics that capture topological variation in tree sets and distribution of support for topological hypotheses across characters. Work on large-scale tree reconstruction will be supported by a PhD student at Munich.

The candidate can anticipate working in a highly collaborative, multi-institutional context that entails the working groups on data set assembly (Doug Soltis-U Florida; dsoltis@botany.ufl.edu, Pam Soltis-U Florida; psoltis@flmnh.ufl.edu; Michael Donoghue-Yale; michael.donoghue@yale.edu), gene tree reconciliation (Todd Vision-UNC; tjv@bio.unc.edu), character evolution (Brian O'Meara-U Tennessee; bomeara@utk.edu), and tree visualization (Michael Sanderson, University of Arizona; sanderm@email.arizona.edu).

In addition to undertaking basic research in phylogenetic methods, the candidate will be expected to work in collaboration with cyberinfastructure developers in the iPlant software team.

Applicants should ideally hold a PhD in Computer Science or Bioinformatics. Qualifications should include familiarity with algorithms and models for phylogenetic analysis and profound programming experience in C/C++. Knowledge of high performance computing methods, parallel programming languages and computer architectures will be a plus.

Inquiries should be directed to Casey Dunn and Alexandros Stamatakis. The position is available immediately. A full description of the iPToL (iPlant Tree of Life) project can be found online at http://iptol.iplantcollaborative.org.