Children’s National Hospital seeks a Principal Bioinformatics Scientist to join its Cancer & Immunology Research Center. You will lead independent bioinformatics research and method innovation, provide technical leadership for infrastructure and tool development, and drive strategic collaborations and grant support in a pediatric research setting. The role includes mentoring junior scientists and contributing to open science initiatives.
What You'll Do
- Uphold the highest ethical standards and integrity in all scientific activities, ensuring data privacy and patient confidentiality.
- Lead and execute independent bioinformatics projects or tool development efforts aligned with institutional priorities.
- Innovate new methodologies, pipelines, or frameworks to address emerging challenges in multi-omics research.
- Drive the scientific vision for computational strategies used in collaborative studies and grant applications.
- Translate biological hypotheses into analytical designs and computational architecture.
- Resolve advanced, multi-layered bioinformatics and workflow issues independently.
- Guide platform architecture for reproducible and sustainable computational infrastructure.
- Set best practices for code development, testing, versioning, and release management.
- Lead or co-lead institutional or multi-center research collaborations.
- Provide strategic consultation to faculty, core services, and program leads on bioinformatics infrastructure and project planning.
- Identify, apply for, and secure grant funding to support independent computational research or collaborative initiatives.
- Serve as a lead or co-investigator on research proposals, contributing analytical aims, budget planning, and team coordination.
- Mentor junior scientists, engineers, analysts, and trainees in technical and scientific development.
- Develop training curricula, technical guides, and best practice documentation for team-wide growth.
- Lead development of open-source tools, datasets, and standards-aligned resources.
- Represent Children’s National in national and international consortia, working groups, and conferences.
- Organize and deliver advanced workshops and training sessions for internal and external audiences.
- Set and clearly communicate team goals and priorities in alignment with departmental goals and budgets.
- Develop the budget and assign resources to meet the team goals.
- Provide the resources and guidance required for employees to perform effectively.
- Develop procedures to ensure high safety and quality, and course-correct as needed.
- Identify customers’ needs and ensure service excellence in meeting those needs.
- Be the link between the department and the team in defining the strategies to meet team goals.
- Provide prompt and clear feedback to staff and support their performance.
- Ensure team adherence to organizational regulations.
- Manage the working environment to promote productivity and motivation.
- Represent the team in clearing obstacles to high performance.
- Hire staff and develop their capabilities.
- Monitor and promote strong employee engagement.
- Encourage and share new ways of making the right work easier to do.
- Recognize and share incremental improvements in operations.
- Promote the success of organizational and department initiatives by clearly aligning programs to the mission.
What We're Looking For
- Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in a Biological or computational discipline.
- 12-15 years in applied bioinformatics, genomics, and computational work (can be inclusive of relevant years of a computational Ph.D. dissertation).
- Expert proficiency in UNIX/Linux environments.
- Expert-level programming and data analysis skills in R, Python, or equivalent.
- Deep experience with NGS, microarray, multi-omics, and other high-throughput platforms and their application to specific biological questions.
- Expertise with a broad range of bioinformatics tools, pipelines, and genomic databases, such as GATK, UCSC Genome Browser, Bioconductor, ENCODE, NCBI, Kids First, gnomAD, ClinVar, OMIM, HGMD, and COSMIC.
- Demonstrated expertise in GitHub, containerization (Docker, Podman, and/or Singularity), and workflow automation.
- Strong grasp of workflow management tools (e.g., Snakemake, Nextflow, WDL, CWL).
- Expertise using high-performance computing (HPC) environments and/or cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Google Cloud) for large-scale analyses.
- Ability to develop user-facing bioinformatics applications using tools such as RShiny or Python Streamlit.
- Demonstrated ability to design and execute robust statistical analyses across diverse genomic and proteomic data types.
- Deep expertise interpreting and visualizing results in biological or clinical contexts.
- Deep domain expertise in at least one disease area or biological system through publications, pipelines, tools, and/or open-source contributions.
- Experience writing scientific manuscripts, figure and methods development, and manuscript authorship.
- Ability to lead complex interdisciplinary projects and guide teams from analysis to publication.
- Strong mentorship skills and demonstrated ability to train junior scientists and analysts.
- Excellent organizational, communication, and presentation skills.
- Proven ability to interact effectively with investigators, clinicians, laboratory staff, peers, and institutional leadership.
- Commitment to open and team science practices, including transparency, reproducibility, shared documentation, and collaborative problem-solving.
- Familiarity with project management tools and methodologies such as Scrum, Agile, Jira, GitHub Projects, Trello, or Asana to coordinate timelines, tasks, and deliverables across teams.
Technical Stack
- Operating Systems: UNIX/Linux
- Languages & Analysis: R, Python
- Bioinformatics Tools & Databases: GATK, UCSC Genome Browser, Bioconductor, ENCODE, NCBI, Kids First, gnomAD, ClinVar, OMIM, HGMD, COSMIC
- Version Control & Containerization: GitHub, Docker, Podman, Singularity
- Workflow Automation: Snakemake, Nextflow, WDL, CWL
- Compute Infrastructure: High-performance computing (HPC), AWS, Google Cloud
- Application Development: RShiny, Python Streamlit
- Project Management: Jira, GitHub Projects, Trello, Asana
Children's National Hospital is an equal opportunity employer.
