Dear Bioinformatics community, We have two fully funded positions (PhD or postdoc) available in the Laboratory of Computational Biology (http://www.aertslab.org) in Leuven. You can join us in our quest to decipher the genomic regulatory code, using a combination of single-cell ATAC-seq, single-cell RNA-seq, and spatial transcriptomics. Central to this work will be the use of computational and machine-learning methods. Depending on your interest, you can also be involved in the wet-lab experiments, to perform single-cell sequencing experiments, technology development, and single-cell CRISPR screens. In both projects you will also have opportunities to explore connections with industry, particularly related to gene therapy. Project 1: the human brain In this project you will develop new computational strategies to identify human genetic variation linked to cell state changes in the human brain, with a particular focus on brain regions affected by Parkinson’s disease. You will use and combine large in-house atlases of single-cell multi-ome data (scATAC-seq + scRNA-seq) with spatial gene expression, Fiber-seq, and whole-genome sequencing (with long read) data. You will also get the opportunity to explore new analysis methods using deep learning. Check out our recent work on decoding gene regulation in the fly brain (Janssens, Aibar & Taskiran, Nature 2022). This project is funded by Aligning Science Against Parkinson’s Disease (ASAP) and brings you in contact with a vibrant international community of neuroscientists. Vacancy: https://jobs.vib.be/j/39320/computational-postdoc-single-cell-regulatory-gen... Project 2: tumor heterogeneity You will study enhancers and dynamic regulatory programs underlying cancer cell plasticity, and investigate how cancer cell states are affected by cell-cell communication within the tumor microenvironment. Check out our recent work on cancer regulatory genomics: a melanoma single-cell atlas of phenotype switching, by Wouters et al., (Nat Cell Biol 2020), and the deep learning models DeepMEL and DeepMEL2 (Minnoye & Taskiran, Genome Research 2020; Kalender Atak & Taskiran, Genome Research 2021). This project is part of our newly funded EOS consortium with the Blanpain, Marine, Lagae, and Saeys labs, so plenty of collaboration opportunities. Vacancy: https://www.kuleuven.be/personeel/jobsite/jobs/60089060 More info? Check out our website (https://aertslab.org) and our publications https://aertslab.org/#publications. Interested? Apply through the vacancies above, or drop me an email if you want to discuss further. Cheers, Stein Stein Aerts, PhD KU Leuven Professor & VIB Group Leader Laboratory of Computational Biology Herestraat 49, P.O. Box 602 3000 Leuven, Belgium Office +32 16 330710 Lab + 32 16 330142 Mobile +32 486 659003 http://www.aertslab.org