Postdoctoral Fellow in Microbial Genomics and Bioinformatics

The NLM is one of the 27 institutes at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The NLM is the world’s largest biomedical library and a leader in research, development, and training in biomedical informatics and health information technology. The DIR within the NLM has two primary research areas: computational health research and computational biology.

1. In computational health research, our efforts center on natural language processing (NLP), clinical image analysis, biomedical ontologies, information modeling, and clinical data analytics.
2. In computational biology, we emphasize transcriptional regulation, chromatin and network biology, structural and functional analysis, sequence statistics, and evolutionary genomics.

The Jiang Lab combines comparative genomics, evolutionary bioinformatics, and large-scale microbial data analysis to uncover novel microbial pathways, identify gene clusters of functional relevance, and understand host–microbiome–phage interactions.

The selected candidate will contribute to ongoing work and develop independent computational research directions. Tasks candidate is expected to take on:

• Identify and characterize microbial gene clusters involved in specialized metabolism or host interaction.
• Perform knowledge-based functional annotation of biosynthetic and metabolic pathways.
• Conduct large-scale microbial comparative genomics and evolutionary analyses.
• Build and analyze phage-bacteria interaction networks using multi-omic datasets.
• Maintain reproducible workflows using Python, R, Bash, or equivalent.

Tasks candidate might take on:

• Apply protein structure prediction tools (AlphaFold, Rosetta, etc.) to unexplored microbial proteins.
• Contribute to metagenomic analyses of complex communities (assembly, binning, taxonomic profiling).
• Develop open-source computational pipelines for functional discovery in microbial genomes.
• Mentor junior trainees in computational genomics.

Position Overview: This is a full-time postdoctoral fellow position. The initial appointment will be for one year, and is renewable on a yearly basis, with extensions up to 5 years total. The NIH offers a competitive stipend (based on postdoctoral experience, see stipend tables) and a stipend supplement for comprehensive health insurance. The NIH is dedicated to the continued education and career development of all its research staff. Candidates are subject to a background investigation. Explore additional information about NIH postdoctoral fellowships.

Essential:

• Ph.D. (earned within the last 5 years) in Bioinformatics, Microbiology, Virology, Computational Biology, or a related field with intensive bioinformatics training.
• Strong programming proficiency in Python, R, and Bash.
• Demonstrated productivity through recent or pending publications.
• Excellent oral and written communication skills.
• Strong sense of organization, independence, and accountability.
• Prior experience in at least two of the following: Protein structure modeling/prediction; Structural bioinformatics; Comparative genomics; Metagenomic analysis; Large-scale genomic data analysis; Evolutionary genomics

Preferred:

• Experience developing computational pipelines or software packages.
• Experience analyzing multi-omic (genomic, metagenomic, metatranscriptomic) datasets.
• Background in microbial metabolism, phage biology, or biosynthetic pathways.