Senior Semantic Modeller

Location - Cambridge UK or Gothenberg (Sweden)

Competitive salary and flexible benefits

Are you a curious semantic modeller seeking a role where your expertise can make an extraordinary impact? This is an opportunity to join a dynamic and enthusiastic environment, whilst delivering critical support to drug discovery projects.

At AstraZeneca, we harness digital, data science & AI to fast-forward our research. Making sure the work born in a lab can make a real difference in the real world. Working here means thinking big, taking responsibility, and working together to deliver impact from our contributions that make the impossible a reality.

You’ll be part of the Data Sciences & Quantitative Biology department – a global, diverse and delivery focused department where we collaborate to support drug projects aiming to impact patients’ lives. In partnership with our experimentalist colleagues and other data scientists, we provide computational analysis and solutions to enable and enhance output from our technical platforms driving our drug discovery efforts.

What you’ll do

You will work as part of a team focused on developing disease-specific knowledge graphs using publicly available databases/knowledge graphs to enable high quality insights and predictions for drug development (eg: prediction of candidate gene targets for a disease). You will work closely with other colleagues with complementary skills and experience, both within and beyond our department, to maximise the quality and impact of your work – this is a team sport. Your role will focus on establishing and refining semantic data models aligned with these drug discovery tasks.

We truly believe that everyone contributes with a unique set of competence. Your curiosity and passion for personal development combined with support from colleagues, mentors and leaders, will ensure you maximise your potential and contribution, building from your current skills, abilities and experience.

Recent examples of our scientific output

For recent published examples relating to our department’s work and these roles, see:

• https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.10062

• https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.06567

• https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10578

Essential for the role

Our team is a highly collaborative group of scientists, working in a constantly evolving technical and scientific landscape. Therefore, you’ll have to be comfortable working at a fast pace, with a team-focused approach. You have excellent communication skills and a proactive and delivery-focused approach.

You also have:

• A PhD - or equivalent numbers of years of experience post-degree - in bioinformatics, ontology and information science, computational sciences, or a related applied quantitative field.

• In-depth experience with using, building and maintaining or refining domain knowledge representations (ontologies, taxonomies) using semantic models, languages, tools and frameworks (e.g. RDF, SCHAL, SKOS, OWL, Protégé), with an application focus

• Familiarity with use of database systems and their querying (e.g. SPARQL, Cypher ), with specific experience with graph databases and formats (RDF and quad/triplestores, labelled property graphs such as Neo4J)

Desirable for the role

• ’Experience developing and maintain public standards i.e. W3C standards working groups, public ontologies, controlled vocabularies, etc

• Experience writing robust, scalable and reproducible code (using a data science focused language, e.g. Python) adhering to best practices

• Working with high performance computing and cloud environments

• Experience of working with data sources relevant to Drug Development or Biomedicine (e.g. Uniprot, CHEMBL, Reactome).

• Proven track record of publishing relevant analysis results and tools in peer-reviewed journals, conferences, and other scientific proceedings.

• Experience of delivering value in a dynamic, iteratively working team and via collaboration with other teams

Why AstraZeneca

There are many opportunities to develop yourself and your career. From our diverse portfolio and teamwork to our ground-breaking innovations – it’s a place for lifelong learning. It is also a place that invites and celebrates diversity as well as speaking up for what you believe in. We want you to be true to yourself at work as you are outside of it.

So, what’s next!

If your passion is science and you want to be part of a team that makes a bigger impact on patients’ lives, then there’s no better place to be.

We look forward to learning more about you – make sure you apply before 27th January 2023 with a CV and a cover letter explaining your interest in this role. If you have any questions regarding this role, the team or working for AstraZeneca, please get in touch via LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/manasa-ramakrishna-544b44196/

Date Posted

Closing Date

AstraZeneca embraces diversity and equality of opportunity. We are committed to building an inclusive and diverse team representing all backgrounds, with as wide a range of perspectives as possible, and harnessing industry-leading skills. We believe that the more inclusive we are, the better our work will be. We welcome and consider applications to join our team from all qualified candidates, regardless of their characteristics. We comply with all applicable laws and regulations on non-discrimination in employment (and recruitment), as well as work authorization and employment eligibility verification requirements.