Post-Doctoral Associate
Gramene Database
Postdoctoral Associate 05677

Job Description

Description

Gramene database (http://www.gramene.org), is seeking applicants for a full time position for a plant biology curator who will participate in the development and maintenance of structured vocabularies for describing plant morphology, anatomy, growth and development stages for its Plant Ontology Consortium (POC) project (http://www.plantontology.org). These vocabularies (ontologies) are necessary to provide the backbone for describing phenotypes and gene expression patterns, and allow database users to perform a set of common queries or searches across different plant databases. The Plant Ontology Consortium is a collaboration among plant genome databases related to rice, Arabidopsis, maize, legumes, Solanaceae, etc.

The successful candidate will work with a team of curators, software engineers, and database developers at Gramene and collaborating database projects, such as TAIR (http://www.arabidopsis.org) and MaizeGDB (http://maizegdb.org); contribute to annotation of phenotypes, germplasm and gene products by using the vocabularies developed in the project; participate in development and application of methods to improve consistency and to enhance the quality of annotations; promote the use of ontologies in comparative genomics and biology through active participation in workshops, seminars and scientific meetings.

Qualifications
Successful candidate will have a Ph.D. degree and training in Plant Biology and related fields (e.g. Systematics, Development, Physiology), a demonstrated ability for independent, critical thinking and excellent communication and teamwork skills. The curator must be able to travel to and attend 2-3 national and international meetings per year. Familiarity with biological data mining, basic UNIX/Linux commands, spreadsheets, and commonly used biological research tools is desired. A working knowledge of SQL would be an asset but not required. Qualified candidates should e-mail a cover letter and resume to Pankaj Jaiswal (pj37@cornell.edu).