DNAnexus is the leading cloud-based SaaS company serving the global life science community. DNAnexus’ health informatics platform serves customers across a spectrum of industries — government, biopharmaceutical, clinical diagnostics, healthcare, and academic research in 48 countries with compliant protection of data, privacy, and intellectual property. The platform provides a secure and collaborative environment where genomics, multi-omics, and real-world data can be combined with clinical data at scale, providing new insights that can lead to improved diagnostics, new targeted therapies, and better patient care.

As a member of our Scientific Community Management team, you will be part of the group responsible for launching and growing the UK Biobank Research Analysis Platform Community!

UK Biobank is a large-scale biomedical database and research resource that is enabling new scientific discoveries to be made that improve public health. The resource provides accredited researchers (over 20,000) access to medical and genetic data from 500,000 volunteer participants to improve our understanding of the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of a wide range of serious and life-threatening illnesses.  It has one of the world's largest collections of WES/WGS data as well as imaging data and phenotypic data. 

DNAnexus has partnered with UK Biobank to launch a Research Analysis Platform where the researchers will access their data and run analyses. In conjunction with that, we are launching a community portal where scientists can (1) exchange scientific and technical knowledge, (2) discuss UK Biobank data, news, and publications, and (3) provide feedback on the platform.

The Community Engagement Scientists (CES) will provide domain expertise in one of the areas: Genomics, Epidemiology, Translational Informatics, or Neuroscience, mirroring the primary researcher personas that use the UK Biobank data. The CES will work on a daily basis with researchers at universities, government, and industry to foster a vibrant community for these researchers built around the UK Biobank Research Analysis Platform (UKB RAP). They will collaborate closely with the cross-functional teams (user experience, product management, marketing).

Drawing on their domain expertise and superlative communication skills the CES makes it easy, fun, and appealing for scientific researchers to use the UKB RAP platform to: 

• Access, explore and integrate data 
• Perform analyses using a wide range of tools from bioinformatics to statistical to image-processing, leverage cloud and big-data functionality (e.g., Spark, Docker, AWS, etc) 
• Collaborate with other researchers

This is an exciting opportunity for a passionate scientific communicator to build a new community. The successful candidate must be an excellent communicator, well-organized, able to work cross-functionally in a fast-paced environment, collaborative, a problem solver and enjoy an analytical and creative challenge.

If you like variety and to wear many hats, then this is the position for you!

Responsibilities

Communication & Education

• Content development: Create, share and disseminate how-to guides, blog posts, Jupyter notebooks
• Instructional design: Develop and deliver training materials to help researchers use the analysis platform to conduct their research on UK Biobank data
• Lead small group and one-on-one sessions with users to help them use the DNAnexus platform 
• Teach researchers how to use SDK to import or develop their own analytic tools
• Proactive communication of community opportunities and challenges to management
• Facilitate and encourage linkages across users to help create supportive network and connect users to knowledge sources  
• Strategically engage with external audiences to disseminate knowledge at workshops, conferences, and seminars

Program management

• Help maintain timeline, milestones, and deliverable overview documents for CES team 
• Real-time tracking of community growth and engagement metrics; report weekly/monthly as needed

Program development

• Obtain feedback from the research community and other key stakeholders; work with CES team to leverage feedback to help modify offering to maximize user satisfaction on platform 
• Foster community around the UKB RAP by building relationships with the community; stimulating engagement, monitoring and mediating conversations, answering questions, commenting and querying in a timely manner, getting information from other departments when required, and identifying influencers within the community
• Train and mentor research community on DNAnexus platform tools
• Engage with UK Biobank and DNAnexus’ scientific advisory boards and other relevant communities
• Develop relationships with organizations, such as professional societies and universities

Technical

• Test and develop methods for research on the UKB RAP to inform best-practices
• Develop Jupyter notebooks and other scripts that either make day-to-day tasks easier for researchers or push the envelope of what is possible with science
• Research, integrate, test, and validate bioinformatics methods on the DNAnexus Platform
• Ability to develop reusable, well-tested software in WDL, Python, R, or shell scripting

Requirements

• M.S. in bioinformatics, computational biology, computer science, translational informatics, epidemiology, neuroinformatics, neuroscience or related scientific field; Ph.D. and interdisciplinary exposure preferred.
• Strong programming ability in one of these frameworks and languages such as WDL, CWL, Nextflow, Python, R, or shell scripting.
• Hands-on experience with genomics sequence analysis, translational informatics, imaging data, or epidemiological studies
• Familiar with approaches and challenges with integrating and harmonizing genotypic and phenotypic data.
• Detail-oriented, with high standards of quality work
• Entrepreneurial “can do” attitude with the ability to find creative, pragmatic solutions with internal and external collaborators in a dynamic, fast-paced environment, executing multiple initiatives with competing priorities
• Proven ability to bring people together and create community, especially in technical contexts
• Outstanding written and oral communication skills, and a strong desire to engage with the research community on an ongoing basis
• Proven ability to engage a diverse range of stakeholders in pursuit of a shared goal
• Proven ability to teach new tools or methodologies to technical audiences
• Proven ability to persuade third parties to take action
• Strong plus, but not required: Experience building community with social media or other web-based tools

Based in Mountain View, California, DNAnexus is experiencing rapid growth and is searching for the best talent to join our team. We recently completed a $200 million financing round to advance our growth globally to further serve leading healthcare and life science organizations. Key investors include Blackstone, Google Ventures, Perceptive Advisors, Northpond Ventures, TPG Biotech, and Foresite Capital.

If you are interested in joining our team, please apply today! 

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.