COMPUTATIONAL SCIENTIST ASSOCIATE

COMPUTATIONAL SCIENTIST ASSOCIATE

University of Alabama at Birmingham

The department of Radiation Oncology seeks a Computational Scientist Associate to support the development of computational tools and analytical pipelines that advance both clinical radiation oncology operations and translational cancer research.

General Responsibilities

• Participates in the problem assessment, analysis, and development of computational methods, pipelines or procedures; evaluates, selects, and applies appropriate methods to the specific research problems.
• Contributes to the analysis of complex data; participates in interpretation and reporting of results.
• Identifies relationships and trends or any factors that could affect the results of research.
• Oversees projects of moderate size, scope, and complexity.
• Implements programming and workflow management systems to scale processes and analysis across a variety of computational platforms, including High Performance Computing clusters. Performs debugging on existing or novel methods and tools, and creates documentation.
• Manages computational environments (virtual environments and containers).
• Contributes to technical proposal preparation and/or presentations.

Duties & Responsibilities

• Design, develop, test, and maintain software applications supporting radiation oncology clinical and research workflows.
• Develop and support tools for DICOM / DICOM-RT parsing, transformation, validation, and workflow automation.
• Build and maintain web applications and APIs for internal clinical/research users.
• Support clinical integration of software tools, including deployment, configuration, user support, and workflow troubleshooting.
• Collaborate with physicists, physicians, dosimetrists, therapists, and IT teams to define requirements and implement research solutions.
• Assist with software validation, QA, and documentation for pre-clinical use.
• Troubleshoot application issues across development, test, and production environments.
• Contribute to code reviews, technical documentation, and standardization of development practices.
• Support data extraction, reporting, and interoperability between radiation oncology systems and downstream tools.
• Participate in continuous improvement of automation workflows for efficiency, reliability, and scalability.
• Develop computational pipelines for analysis of genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic, and other high-throughput biological datasets.
• Support analysis of RNA sequencing, whole exome sequencing, spatial transcriptomics, proteomics, and other multi-omics datasets generated in radiation oncology research laboratories.
• Assist investigators with statistical analysis, data visualization, and interpretation of high-dimensional biological datasets.
• Develop reproducible research pipelines using Python, R, and workflow management tools.
• Integrate molecular datasets with clinical radiation oncology data to support translational research studies.
• Support analysis of preclinical models, including cell line experiments, drug response studies, and patient-derived tumor models.
• Perform other duties as assigned

Preferred

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, medical physics, biomedical engineering, data science, or a related field.
• Relevant experience in software development, computational science, computational biology, biomedical data science, or clinical systems integration.
• Required experience with DICOM, preferably including DICOM-RT objects (e.g., RT Structure Set, RT Plan, RT Dose, images). Proficiency in C# and Python or R. Experience developing and supporting web applications and/or web APIs.
• Experience working in a team-based software development environment (e.g., version control, testing, issue tracking).
• Strong problem-solving skills and ability to work across technical and clinical stakeholders.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Experience in radiation oncology software development or clinical workflow integration.
• Experience with Varian ARIA and/or Ethos (preferred).
• Familiarity with radiation oncology data standards and workflows (simulation, contouring, planning, treatment delivery, QA).
• Experience analyzing high-throughput biological datasets such as RNA sequencing, proteomics, or genomic data.
• Experience with R or Python data science ecosystems.
• Experience integrating clinical and molecular datasets.
• Experience building reproducible computational pipelines.
• Experience working with high-performance computing environments. Experience developing data visualization tools or dashboards for biomedical research.
• Experience with clinical integration in hospital/healthcare environments, including deployment and user support.
• Experience building REST APIs and modern web application backends/frontends.
• Experience with databases (e.g., SQL Server, PostgreSQL) and data modeling.
• Experience with containerization and deployment tools (e.g., Docker). Familiarity with HL7/FHIR and/or other healthcare interoperability standards (nice to have).
• Experience with software validation and documentation for clinical/research tools

Qualifications

Education

• Master's degree in a related field OR Bachelor's degree in related field and two (2) years of related experience.
• Work experience may NOT substitute for education requirement