Postdoctoral Research Fellow

**Be a part of the legacy: Postdoctoral Research Fellow Program**.

**THE OPPORTUNITY**:
The Discovery Cardio-Metabolic Disease (CMD) department seeks a Postdoctoral Research Fellow Scientist to leverage cutting-edge spatial profiling technologies to interrogate disease mechanisms. The Post Doc will identify novel targets and biomarkers for ophthalmic diseases with high unmet needs. We seek a computational or hybrid scientist with demonstrated experience translating a strong understanding of disease biology into computational analyses that yield biological insight. You will collaborate closely with colleagues in Discovery CMD, Data and Genome Sciences, and external vendors and collaborators, thus gaining invaluable experience leading a project in a matrixed cross-functional industry environment.

The Postdoctoral Research Fellow will join Singapore's Molecular Biomarkers, Discovery CMD team. Our site is located within the Biopolis, the heart of Singapore's biomedical research community. Here, we are focused on identifying and validating new drug targets, exploring innovative therapeutic modalities, and leveraging clinical studies and patient-derived material to understand biomarkers of disease or therapeutic response. Our state-of-the-art laboratory supports discovery biology and translational medicine and is an integral part of the company's world-class network for drug and vaccine discovery.

Our Research Laboratories' Postdoctoral Research Fellow Program aims to be a best-in-industry program for industrial postdoctoral researchers, designed to provide you with an academic focus in a commercial environment. With a large pharmaceutical company's resources, reach, and expertise, postdoctoral researchers will be positioned to excel in an institution committed to breakthrough innovation in research and discovery.

**What will you do**:

- Lead design, analysis, and interpretation of spatial profiling approach to analyze preclinical models and patient samples to characterize molecular pathophysiology of metabolic syndrome-associated ophthalmic disease.
- Develop therapeutic area expertise in metabolic disease and ophthalmology to formulate biological hypotheses, design and execute appropriate experiments and analysis, and interpret results to yield biological insight.
- Become a technical expert at leading-edge spatial technologies such as Visium, MERSCOPE, CosMx, and Xenium, and make technical recommendations for study design.
- Collaborate with internal stakeholders and vendors to design and execute wet lab aspects of spatial profiling experiments, including troubleshooting and optimizing tissue processing, imaging, and/or Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) workflows.
- Pioneer and implement analytic pipelines and workflows for spatial transcriptomics analyses and integration with data modalities including H&E, multiplex IHC, bulk RNA-seq, and proteomics, as part of a larger internal team of computational scientists, bioinformaticians, and statisticians.
- Communicate and present results to internal and external audiences in forums, including cross-functional team meetings, conferences, culminating in journal publication
- Accurately document experiments, data analysis, and results in electronic notebooks and other required formats in compliance with company policies and project needs.

**What should you have**:

- PhD in Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, or Biomedical Sciences
- Proficient in command line tools including R, Python, shell scripting
- Demonstrated experience in computational analysis and interpretation of NGS and imaging-based data, especially single-cell and spatial transcriptomics
- Familiarity with public databases and experience ingesting, mining, and integrating public data
- Experience using high-performance computing environments and cloud computing.
- Excellent interpersonal and collaborative skills
- Strong written and oral communication skills with a broad scientific audience

**Preferred Experience and Skills**:

- Expertise in ophthalmology therapeutic area
- Experience in molecular biology assays, especially high-throughput genomic techniques, immunohistochemistry, and in situ hybridization
- High-quality first-author publications

We are a research-driven biopharmaceutical company. Our mission is built on the simple premise that if we "follow the science," great medicines can significantly impact our world. A research-driven enterprise dedicated to world-class science can succeed by inventing medicine and vaccine innovations that make a difference for patients across the globe.

**Who we are **

We are known as Merck & Co., Inc., Kenilworth, New Jersey, USA in the United States and Canada and MSD everywhere else. For more than a century, we have been inventing for life, bringing forward medicines and vaccines for many of the world's most challenging diseases. Today, our company continues to be at the forefront of research to deliver innovative health solutions and advance the