Specialist Team Lead

The mission of SFA is to ensure and secure a supply of safe food for Singapore.

The National Centre for Food Science (NCFS) supports SFA’s vision of ensuring safe food for all by being a national reference laboratory on food science, conducting food safety monitoring to generate scientific data for risk assessment, enforcing food regulations to protect consumer health and ensuring food safety in partnership with stakeholders across the entire food and supply chain to address emerging food safety and security concerns. NCFS also builds up food safety science infrastructure & competencies for new and emerging foodborne hazards.

The officer will be the Specialist Team Lead of Food Microbiology under Food Science Rapid Response Department to supervise food safety testing and laboratory functions at the NCFS to support cross-department operations. On top of undertaking analytical services and strategizing projects to support rapid detection of food-related and foodborne pathogens, the officer will also provide science-based knowledge to support food regulation and risk assessment as expert opinion leader in national and international platforms. Based on the operational needs of the department, the officer may also perform cross-functional roles or deploy to other teams/ department to broaden the knowledge and skillsets in related scopes to be trained for technically competency and operational readiness to support any potential emerging threat or response operations.

The officer is responsible for the following:

- Supervise and lead a team of microbiologists in ensuring smooth daily operations in food diagnostics testing, ensure all testing procedures are performed with accuracy and precision for results interpretation and provide scientific support on investigation of foodborne disease outbreak with effective use of resources.
- Spearhead the sense making of daily testing findings for preparation of reports, perform trending analysis and highlight out-of-norm test findings.
- Strategise innovative projects to enhance the rapid detection and characterization of (emerging) foodborne pathogens.
- Conduct regulatory science and sound risk assessment in Food microbiology domain and provide expert opinion to support enforcement action, regulatory standard review and optimisation of sampling and testing programme.
- Provide advice and solutions for strengthening laboratory operations and productivity via automation and digitisation.
- Showcase the teams’ scientific achievements through publication in peer-reviewed journals as well as through the delivery of presentation on dedicated areas at national and international platforms.
- Implement laboratory quality assurance programmes, including conduct internal quality control testing and participate in international proficiency testing to ensure that the laboratory practices are in full compliances with ISO/IEC 17025:2017 quality standard.
- Lead and execute procurement plan of scientific equipment and laboratory supplies based on the laboratory operation needs to ensure financial prudence and compliance to the financial rules and regulations.
- Carry out related duties and roles as assigned by supervisor to maximize laboratory efficiency.

Job Requirements
- PhD or Masters in Molecular Biology, Microbiology, Virology, Biological Sciences, or other relevant disciplines.
- At least 3 years of working experiences in managing a team in food testing laboratory or Microbiology Research laboratory.
- Must have advanced knowledge in Microbiology and Molecular Biology techniques with good understanding of foodborne pathogens.
- Preferable with specialized knowledge in sequencing tools and bioinformatics analysis of microbes for molecular evolution and construct of phylogenetic trees, e.g. whole genome sequencing, metagenomics, MEGA software.
- Preferably possess knowledge in quality assurance program or ISO17025:2017.
- Possess critical thinking and good writing skills to deliver project proposal plan, scientific report, and publication.
- Possess leadership initiative, strong ownership, and technical skills to handle challenges.
- Able to work in a tight deadline and fast-pace environments to deliver results.
- Team player, dynamic, good interpersonal/communication skills.
- Computer literacy, preferably with good knowledge in statistical and data analytics software.

Location

Techquest, 7 International Business Park