Job and Ph.D. Vacancies

Post-Doc positions:

28th MAY 2004

As a result of success in two BBSRC grant applications, will will shortly be advertising four positions to join the group with a starting date of 1st September 2004.   More details will be posted here shortly.
 

Ph.D.  positions:

2004 Entry

Position filled.

Please see the details below and on the School of Life Sciences Ph.D. pages for instructions on how to apply for entry in October 2005.

Summer Students:

2004 - NO VACANCIES. For Summer 2005, please see below.

Every year we get a number of requests from undergraduate students from around the world who would like to spend 2-3 months in the summer working in the group.   We are happy to have summer students (see the Alumni pages for past students). In the past, students have written web interfaces and server-side code to applications that we have. Future projects will likely involve writing java servlets and/or developing SOAP-based services.  Students get to use our HPC cluster of computers and learn applications to protein sequence and structure analysis. 

In 2004 approximately 50 people wrote asking for a place and almost all would have been good candidates to work with us over the summer.   Unfortunately, we can at best only take one person.  We try to reply to all who make enquiries, but with so many applicants, this takes quite a lot of time. We are sorry to have to implement a more formal application procedure, but if you are interested in a summer placement for 2005 please follow the instructions below.

1. You must be competent in a computer programming language such as Java and/or perl. In a summer placement, you will learn how to use this skill in a bioinformatics environment. We are not able to take summer students from biology/biochemistry who have no computer programming experience.

2. You do not have to pay us fees, but you must have funds to pay for your living and travel expenses yourself.  We have no funds to pay you during your visit, or cover any of your other expenses.

3. To apply for a summer placement, send the following by email to Geoff Barton by the deadline of: 1st February 2005

(a) Full CV including details of any research projects you may have undertaken and any programming experience you have. Examples of programming projects would be good to include.

(b) Having read our web pages, please write in half a page, an outline  of the type of project you think you would like to do.

(c) Include contact details for your course tutor or other referee who is prepared to write a reference.

4. We will shortlist candidates in February and interview as necessary by telephone in early March.

General Notes

Opportunities: If you would like to join us as an independently funded research fellow, or extended visitor, then please contact me to discuss options.

Ph.D. Studentship Opportunities: Ph.D. students in the group work on research projects that enable them to make new contributions to techniques and the understanding of biological systems.   Students typically develop software to analyse biological data and mine databases.  They may also then apply this new software in collaboration with experimentalists. Recent students have developed  more accurate secondary structure prediction methods (see JPred)  and developed improved statistics for sequence database searching (to be published.)

Ph.D. Applicant Requirements: Ph.D. applicants should have a strong interest in computing.  Some prior experience of programming under Unix/Linux is helpful as it gives an indication of aptitude for the work but this experience is not essential.   Previous students have come from first degrees in:  Chemistry, Biochemistry, Theoretical Physics and Genetics, but we also welcome applications from students of other disciplines such as Computer Science and Mathematics.

Please see the School of Life Sciences Ph.D. web pages for details of how to apply and the funding opportunities.

This site was last updated: Tuesday, 01 June, 2004

Geoff Barton, Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Research, University of Dundee, Scotland