We will have two postdoc positions starting in January 2024, for young researchers with a background in computational and/or biological sciences, to work in a project at the crossroads between population genetics and complex trait analysis. The project is a inter-university collaboration involving Prof. Luca Pagani at the university of Padova, Dr. Davide Marnetto at Uni. Torino and Prof. Nicola Barban at Uni. Bologna. It is funded by the main Italian competitive grant (PRIN 2022) and led by Prof. Luca Pagani.
We aim to detect genetic assortative mating (GAM) for anthropometric, behavioral, cognitive and health-related complex traits in up to 600.000 individuals from the UK Biobank and the Estonian Biobank. We will analyze the similarity between parental haploid genomes, apply state-of-the-art methods to identify parental haploid genomes and compute parent-specific polygenic scores. GAM occurring during several generations will be investigated by looking at the genomes of ~40.000 individuals from the UK Biobank whose genome shows contributions from two or more highly differentiated genetic components which mixed in historical time. Finally we will compare these results with the extent of GAM detected in the Italian genomes publicly available from the literature. We thus aim to set the basis for future sequencing and investigation campaigns to better understand the role of social structure and mate choice in shaping the genetic landscape of the contemporary Italian population.
The day-to-day activity will consist in implementing and running command line tools by building reproducible and robust computational pipelines, with regular contacts between the groups involved in the project and the larger AnthroPopGen meta-lab.
What we are looking for: young post-docs or post-lauream researchers (a recent PhD will be considered a plus but is not required) with basic experience in the application of computational methods for the analysis of genetic data. We require at least rudimentary expertise on the Linux command line and in the management of common data formats in genetics (PLINK, VCF,...); coding skills in Python/R will be considered a significant plus.
What we are offering:
One position at the Pagani Lab, within University of Padua dept. of Biology, under the supervision of Prof. Luca Pagani, the project PI. Prof. Pagani has a long term experience in modern and ancient human population genetics, and in supervising a medium-sized group of postdoctoral and doctoral researchers developed at Padova and at the Institute of Genomics, University of Tartu, where the he holds a research affiliation as head of the Modern Human Population Genomics unit.
One position at the Computational Biology Lab (Corso Massimo D’Azeglio 52, 10126, Turin, Italy), under the supervision of Dr Davide Marnetto. This is a medium-small purely computational group led by Prof Paolo Provero with decades of experience in bioinformatics and computational genomics, in addition to a great track record in mentoring young researchers towards expertise in computational biology research.
Contract duration: 20 months
Net monthly salary: approx. 2100 €
Contract type: Assegno di Ricerca
If interested please get in contact with us by email (luca.pagani@unipd.it; davide.marnetto@unito.it) enclosing a CV!