NGS Bioinformatics Intern
Our mission is to make biology easier to engineer. Ginkgo is constructing, editing, and redesigning the living world in order to answer the globe’s growing challenges in health, energy, food, materials, and more. Our bioengineers make use of an in-house automated foundry for designing and building new organisms.
The NGS team is looking for a talented biologist with a passion for computation who is excited to transform and interrogate our ever growing mountain of sequencing data in order to unlock the secrets of life. The NGS Computational Biology team at Ginkgo Bioworks supports our organism engineering programs by delivering insights from genomic, transcriptomic, and metagenomic datasets.
As a Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) Bioinformatics Intern, you will gain experience in manipulating, querying, visualizing and interpreting large amounts of NGS data. This opportunity will expose you to strategies for building re-usable data storage models, effective experiment design and information mining from large amounts of data using existing bioinformatics tools, as well as writing and running your own NGS analysis tools and pipelines. As part of this role, you will work closely with an interdisciplinary team including the systems biology team, the RNAseq sub-team and wet-lab biologists to create solutions that serve a wide range of initiatives.
Specific projects could include enabling systematic capture of Ginkgo codebase assets for transcriptomics through a centralized database or creating tools to enable genomic edit verification for mammalian genomes - both of these will be used to answer important biological questions and deliver key milestones for various projects utilizing a variety of chassis organisms.
Please note: this role is primarily remote but the team will sponsor occasional trips onsite to our Boston offices for meetings.
The Ginkgo Bioworks Early Talent program is open to students who will return to their degree programs upon completion of their employment at Ginkgo. Candidates must be enrolled in a United States based institution and/or have work authorization in the United States to be eligible to participate.
Responsibilities
- Review literature and open source bioinformatics tools
- Develop scripts and workflows to organize, store, visualize and interpret large amounts of transcriptomics data sets across a range of species
- Work collaboratively with an interdisciplinary team consisting of computational biologists, data scientists and wet-lab scientists
- Report progress and findings to relevant team members and stakeholders
Minimum Requirements
- Currently enrolled in a master’s or PhD program, concentrating in Biology, Biomedical Engineering, Computational Science, or a related field
- Completion of a course in molecular genetics or genomics
- Completion of a course in data structures or equivalent
- Comfort in a scripting language (Python and/or R preferred)
- Comfort using a database management language like SQL
- Comfort using Amazon Web Services
- Familiarity with the command line
- Strong verbal and written interpersonal skills
- Strong organizational skills with high attention to detail
- Ability to work independently and collaboratively
We also feel that it’s important to point out the obvious here – there’s a serious lack of diversity in our industry, and that needs to change. Our goal is to help drive that change. Ginkgo is deeply committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion in all of its practices, especially when it comes to growing our team. Our culture promotes inclusion and embraces how rewarding it is to work with people from all walks of life.
We’re developing a powerful biological engineering platform, so we must remain mindful of the many ways our technology can – and will – impact people around the world. We care about how our platform is used, and having a diverse team to build it gives us the best chance that it’s something we’ll be proud of as it continues to grow. Therefore, it’s critical that we incorporate the diverse voices and visions of all those who play a role in the future of biology.
It is the policy of Ginkgo Bioworks to provide equal employment opportunities to all employees and employment applicants.