IT Analyst/Programmer - 2 (Haendel)

Be a Tar Heel!

A global higher education leader in innovative teaching, research and public service, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill consistently ranks as one of the nation’s top public universities. Known for its beautiful campus, world-class medical care, commitment to the arts and top athletic programs, Carolina is an ideal place to teach, work and learn.One of the best college towns and best places to live in the United States, Chapel Hill has diverse social, cultural, recreation and professional opportunities that span the campus and community.University employees can choose from a wide range of professional training opportunities for career growth, skill development and lifelong learning and enjoy exclusive perks for numerous retail, restaurant and performing arts discounts, savings on local child care centers and special rates on select campus events. UNC-Chapel Hill offers full-time employees a comprehensive benefits package, paid leave, and a variety of health, life and retirement plans and additional programs that support a healthy work/life balance.

Primary Purpose of Organizational Unit

Our mission is to improve the health and well-being of North Carolinians and others whom we serve. We accomplish this by providing leadership and excellence in the interrelated areas of patient care, education and research.
Patient care: We promote health and provide superb clinical care while maintaining our strong tradition of reaching underserved populations and reducing health disparities across North Carolina and beyond.
Education: We prepare tomorrow`s healthcare professionals and biomedical researchers from all backgrounds by facilitating learning within innovative and integrated curricula and team-oriented interprofessional education to ensure a highly skilled workforce.
Research: We develop and support a rich array of outstanding health sciences research programs, centers and resources. We provide infrastructure and opportunities for collaboration among disciplines throughout and beyond our university to support outstanding research. We foster programs in the areas of basic, translational, mechanistic and population research.

Position Summary

The Department of Genetics invites applications for an IT Analyst/Programmer (Semantic Engineer) in the Translational and Integrative Sciences Laboratory (TISLab.org). This IT Analyst/Programmer (Semantic Engineer) position will join a highly interactive, supportive, and interdisciplinary group of faculty, staff scientists, postdoctoral fellows, and students. The IT Analyst/Programmer (Semantic Engineer) position will contribute to the Department of Genetics and TISLab’s diverse portfolio of research, including grant-funded programs, potential commercialization opportunities of developed software, and transdisciplinary and trans-institutional partnerships. The IT Analyst/Programmer (Semantic Engineer) will provide IT/software engineering support, leading the development of and contributing to semantic pipelines and algorithms, data models, ontologies, and semantic data harmonization and integration strategies for a variety of translational research contexts, including the following data types: clinical research variables, basic research experiments, imaging metadata, genotype-phenotype data, expression, and other ‘omics data. Other responsibilities of the IT Analyst/Programmer (Semantic Engineer) include technical contribution to research publications and preliminary work for grants and funding applications, and collaborations with community-wide efforts aimed at promoting open, integrated, and rigorous practices in research, data engineering, and scholarly communication. TISLab focuses on areas such as automated and manual bio data curation, knowledge representation, semantic engineering, automated reasoning, and the development and evaluation of algorithms and software systems that advance these practices in support of artificial intelligence. Flexible work arrangements, including virtual/hybrid work locations, are an integral part of the School of Medicine’s Working Forward initiative. As such, this position’s work location is designated as virtual. Please note that the designated work location is subject to change based on the unit’s business needs.

Minimum Education and Experience Requirements

Master’s and 1-2 years’ experience; or Bachelors and 2-4 years’ experience; or will accept a combination of related education and experience in substitution.

Required Qualifications, Competencies, and Experience

Experience in semantic data engineering.

Preferred Qualifications, Competencies, and Experience

Experience implementing informatics/bioinformatics pipelines and export of human interpretable format(s) (graphs/figures, tables, etc…); processing, analysis, and display Experience in engineering and graph database work. Experience programming in Python and deploy Jupyter notebooks. Experience working independently and openly on GitHub. Education within computer science, clinical informatics, biomedical informatics, biosciences, or a related field. Experience working with one or more of the following: Graph databases, Triplestores, Ontologies, Semantic data models or other semantic technologies. Experience in the collection, storage, transformation, standardization, harmonization, and analysis of legacy data stored in a variety of formats (e.g., OWL, RDF, JSON-LD, JSON, Python, SPARQL, and/or graph query languages such as Cypher, relational databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Oracle, Triplestores, or other semantic technologies). Experience with software development and project management tools, and file version control systems (e.g., Git/GitHub, Jira, Confluence). Experience with web application and user interface development using semantic technologies and/or deploying semantic artifacts in the context of software system architecture, design, and implementation Experience modeling and managing semantically annotated data. Experience developing and evaluating data curation workflows, data quality, and validation according to semantic standards. Experience managing technical aspects of informatics/information science projects