Job opportunities and staff changes at Xfam

We have been very sad to see a few people leave the group recently. Rob Finn has been the dedicated and hard working project leader of Pfam for many years. In fact as a summer student he is credited with preparing most of the families for Pfam 2.0 [1]! We’re expecting to see great things from him at his new post at HHMI’s Janelia Farm. We’ve also seen Jaina Mistry get married and move to another city, fortunately for us she’s still working part-time for Pfam remotely. Jen Daub after her whirlwind trip around the world will also be working part-time on the Rfam project from her luxurious new abode in France.

This means we have a number of opportunities for bright and enthusiastic people. We are looking to recruit a new Project Leader to lead the Pfam group. This is an exciting opportunity for a motivated, enthusiastic and experienced computational biologist, and is an influential position working with a high profile bioinformatic resource. We anticipate the candidate will lead the next phase of database development that will include community annotation and the incorporation of new developments based on the HMMER3 software. We would expect the successful candidate to have their own research ideas
and be able to deliver research outputs with the group.

We are also looking for two Computational Biologists to join the group. The successful candidate will ideally a MSc in bioinformatics or equivalent experience and a strong background in molecular biology, biochemistry, genetics or similar.

We would also like to take the opportunity to welcome Professor John Burke from the University of Vermont. John is taking a one year sabbatical with Rfam to learn about all things bioinformatic. He is already an expert on all things to do with ribozymes and RNA structure, so we expect some major improvements in Rfam in these areas.

Last but not least, we have Chris Boursnell, a refugee from the banking world, who is working us and the fine Recode database
to improve our coverage of frame-shift elements.