Jobs

Title: PhD for Machine Learning/Bioinformatics Advances in Drug Discovery

As the Director of Bioinformatics for PsychoGenics, you will take a lead role in transforming the current process of drug discovery. This role is for the Machine Learning PhD who can apply these methods to real world science. Working with leading experts in the field, you will revamp traditional methodologies. PsychoGenics is changing the playing field by developing Machine Learning methodologies for high throughput in vivo drug discovery. If successful, your research will significantly reduce the cost per novel compound screened thus increasing the number of compounds that can be screened, resulting in a drastic increase in the number of new drugs found.

PsychoGenics is a young 40-person Angel funded company in Hawthorne, New York. We have developed the first high-throughput in vivo behavioral testing system, which we believe can transform CNS drug discovery. Our founders recognized the need for a company to focus on CNS research and the bottlenecks in the drug discovery process. Our other work in this area includes phenotyping knockouts and transgenics, and finding functionality associated with mutations and secondary screening of compounds. Other facets of our research and services aim to identify and understand the function of genes involved in behavioral and neurological disorders. We will use this knowledge to develop better models of these disorders and to discover validated targets for novel drugs.

As our Director of Bioinformatics based in Hawthorne, NY, your first assignment will be developing algorithms for our SmartCube system. SmartCube combines complex hardware with computer-vision algorithms and bioinformatics. To contribute to further development, you will need an exceptional understanding of Machine Learning algorithms, such as decision trees, bagging, boosting, support vector machines, and logistic regression, as well as the proven ability to create new ones. Knowledge of reinforcement learning and optimization methods will also be useful. Since the field of Machine Learning as well as this position involves the integration of computational methods with both traditional and newer statistical methods, a solid understanding of statistics is required. You should be able to program well, and code algorithms with command-line interfaces or simple GUIs. This is a tremendous opportunity with a dynamic company in a demanding environment.

TO APPLY: Send a resume and cover letter to job314@psychogenics.com and include your answers to the brief survey below:

1. Describe your accomplishments with the development of new data mining algorithms (skip this one if it is already present in your resume/cover letter).

2. Which academic conferences do you prefer to attend and why?

3. What is your understanding of CNS-related drug discovery?

4. Describe any work you have done in the area of hypothesis testing and dealing with the issues of multiple hypothesis testing.

5. When I have need to program something, my preferred language is:
a) A Scripting language (Perl, Python, VBScript, etc.)
b) C/C++
c) Java
d) LabVIEW, Matlab, S, or R
e) Other

6. I am:
a) a citizen or national of the US
b) a current H1-B visa holder
c) a lawful Permanent Resident of the US
d) a student visa holder
e) a current TN visa holder or eligible for a TN visa
f) Other