Postdoctoral Fellow in Cancer Bioinformatics (f/m/x)

We are looking for an enthusiastic postdoctoral fellow to join our newly founded Integrated Cancer Research Laboratory at the CECAD in Cologne. As a postdoctoral fellow, you will leverage a large prospective cohort of patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) to interrogate the differential impact of various treatment modalities on the plasticity and evolution of CLL. Your responsibilities will include a multi-omic analysis of blood and bone marrow samples and the integration with detailed clinical data to model the evolutionary trajectories of CLL under ‘real-world’ therapeutic selective pressures. The project will generate unprecedented insights into the biology of CLL and reveal how treatment resistance and disease relapses evolve in patients with cancer.

• A PhD degree in bioinformatics or a life science related field with proven track record in data analysis/bioinformatics
• Fluency in programming languages (Python and/or R, comand line, HPC use)
• Experience in cancer genomics, particularly in the analysis of single cell RNAseq and ATACseq as well as bulk whole genome sequencing data
• Expertise in the development of computational pipelines and databases
• Ability to supervise PhD and Master students
• Excellent communication in English (written and speech)

Would you like to join us or want to hear more? Feel free to reach out to Dr. Othman Al-Sawaf in case you have any questions or submit you application via the link below (including a detailed CV, list of publications, two references and a brief statement on your research interests).

• A great collaborative atmosphere on a modern campus with state-of-the-art core facilities
• Working and living in a great international city in the heart of Europe
• Access to unique biosamples and clinical data with unprecedented granularity
• A highly motivated group with national and international visibility of all team members
• Possibility to actively shape the group and develop leadership skills
• Regular active attendance of national and international scientific meetings
• Position is for a fixed term of 3 years, but with possible long-term prospects

Working at the University Hospital Cologne and the Medical Faculty means helping to shape the future - the future of medicine, of patients and, of course, your own future. You benefit from 60 clinics and institutes as well as numerous other departments and facilities and more than 12,000 jobs. The Faculty of Medicine of the University of Cologne and the University Hospital Cologne assume important social tasks in research, teaching and patient care. A close network with many university and non-university partners guarantees an internationally successful science and the excellent education of our students.

The Integrated Cancer Research Laboratory, led by Dr Othman Al-Sawaf and based at the CECAD and Department I of Internal Medicine, was founded in 2024 and is funded by a large Emmy-Noether-Grant of the German Research Council (DFG). The focus of the lab is to integrate multimodal analyses to study the plasticity, evolution and prognosis of cancer with a special focus on hematological malignancies. To this end, the lab utilizes a unique biobank with blood and bone marrow samples from patients treated within large (>900 patients) prospective clinical trials. The group is embedded in a network with many local collaborators, including the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) 1530 and the German CLL Study Group (GCLLSG), as well as many national and international partners in academia and industry. Previous work has been frequently cited (Al-Sawaf et al, Nature Medicine 2024; Al-Sawaf et al, Nature Medicine 2023; Al-Sawaf et al, Nature Communications 2023; see Pubmed) and the aim of the lab is to continue producing highly impactful and patient-relevant results.