The oat breeding program at South Dakota State University (SDSU) is focused on developing new and improved oat varieties for use as forage, feed, and food. The breeding program itself works closely with the oat milling industry, including General Mills, a major global food company whose oat breeding program is located at SDSU to develop oat varieties with improved milling and nutritional characteristics. The SDSU Agronomy, Horticulture, and Plant Science Department is looking for a post-doctoral research associate to lead research related to the successful implementation of genomic selection into SDSU oat breeding program to increase the speed and accuracy of our breeding mission. In addition, the researcher will act to network with major food companies, and collaborate with the oat research community to advance the techniques and methodologies available throughout the oat breeding and milling communities.

Role:
• Support oat breeding through the implementation of genomic selection into SDSU oat breeding program.
• Apply novel analysis approaches to enhance prediction accuracy and simulate cross progenies and predict their performance within the necessary timeframe of breeding operations.
• Assist in developing proposals to federal agencies for the continued advancement of the breeding program.
• Communicate results through presentation at conferences and scholarly publications.

Required qualifications:
• Ph.D. in bioinformatics, computational genomics, molecular plant breeding, or related discipline.
• Expertise with statistical models and applications to genetics and plant breeding.
• Experience in data analysis platforms (R, python, etc), computational infrastructure (cloud computing, linux environments, databases, etc), and reproducible science (version control, scripting, workflow languages).
• Experience in conducting genomic selection analyses.

Duration: yearly contract with opportunity to renew for 3 years.

How to apply:
Send resume (with the name and contact info of three references) and a cover letter to Melanie Caffe-Treml (melanie.caffe at sdstate.edu).