Scientist / Senior Scientist (Bioinformatician) New Singapore Food Agency | Sciences (e.g. life[...]

What the role is

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 regulatory functions in ensuring safe food for all by providing scientific evidence through laboratory testing, research and development, data science and exposure analysis, and risk assessment to address emerging food safety and security concerns. NCFS is equipped with state-of-the-art laboratory facilities and is constantly developing new capabilities to detect emerging foodborne hazards.

The officer will be a Scientist/Senior Scientist in the Biological Research team under the Research & Exposure Science Department (RESD) to develop and deploy advanced food safety research and testing capabilities to address evolving threats from foodborne hazards. The selected candidate will have ample career development opportunities including access to advanced training courses, presentation at local and international conferences, and collaboration with internal and external stakeholders.

The officer will be expected to:

• Conduct applied biological and microbiological research, identify problem statements, generate research hypotheses, recommend technology-based solutions, and/or determine computational strategies, in support of the agency’s food safety operations, risk assessment and policies
• Perform integrative analysis on high throughput sequencing datasets related to food microbiology (e.g. genomics, transcriptomics, metagenomics and metatranscriptomics)
• Conduct phylogenetic and statistical inference to obtain biological insights from big genomic data
• Develop and implement bioinformatics pipelines for workflow automation
• Build models and classifiers for predictive analytics
• Develop and maintain databases for cataloguing large microbial genomic datasets
• Communicate research findings through conference presentations, scientific publications, and project reports that may be catered for different audiences. (E.g. academics, scientists, policy makers, and the general public)
• Organise and maintain proper documentation of research data, scientific interpretations, and project proposals
• Provide basic bioinformatics training for in-house microbiologists
• Perform administrative support work such as procurement of laboratory supplies and equipment as well as preparation of research grants

• BSc, MSc or PhD in computational biology, biological sciences, computer science, or other relevant disciplines
• Relevant experience in computer programming and/or genomics analysis (WGS and metagenomics)
• Familiarity with Illumina and/or Nanopore sequencing data analysis.
• Experience with various sequence mapping, variant calling and genome assembly tools
• Knowledge in scripting bioinformatics pipelines (Nextflow/Snakemake)
• Strong programming and debugging skills, preferably with experience in Python and R
• Comfortable with High-Performance/Cloud computing and ability to learn new programming languages and paradigms with minimal guidance
• Basic understanding of food microbiology, molecular biology, and epidemiology
• Knowledge in microbiome and/or microbial genetics would be an advantage
• Possess peer-reviewed scientific publications in bioinformatics and/or microbiology
• Strong critical thinking, problem-solving, communication and collaborative skills
• Resilience and ability to multi-task

• Work Location: National Centre for Food Science, Techquest, 7 International Business Park, Singapore

If you do not hear from us within 4 weeks of your job ad closing date, we seek your understanding that it is likely that we are not moving forward with your application for this role. We thank you for your interest and would like to assure you that this does not affect your other job applications with the Public Service. We encourage you to explore and apply for other job roles with the Singapore Food Agency or the wider Public Service.

The Singapore Food Agency (SFA) is a new Statutory Board formed under the ‘Ministry of Sustainability and the Environment (MSE) to oversee food safety and security. The SFA will serve as the single point of contact for public feedback on food-related issues, and strengthen management of foodborne disease outbreaks to protect public health. The SFA will also facilitate more business-friendly regulations with oversight of all food safety policies and consolidation of food laboratory capabilities to deepen competencies in food diagnostics, and research and development in food safety.