Associate Scientist, Post Doc Fellow- Immunology Analytics
Merck & Co.
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Descripción de la vacante
Merck & Co. in the United States seeks a Postdoctoral Research Fellow to join a cross-functional team exploring single-cell and spatial transcriptomics in immune-mediated inflammatory diseases.
You will analyze large-scale human tissue datasets to identify disease mechanisms and translational biomarkers, bridging computational biology with immunology and translational medicine. The role offers mentorship, opportunities to publish, and collaboration across translational teams, contributing to
Formación
- PhD in Computational Biology or related field.
- PhD must be completed by Spring 2027 or already held.
Responsabilidades
- Analyze large-scale single-cell RNA-seq and spatial transcriptomics datasets.
- Develop and implement data integration and annotation methods.
- Collaborate with immunologists and clinicians to translate findings.
Conocimientos
Educación
Herramientas
Descripción del empleo
We are seeking a highly motivated Postdoctoral Research Fellow to join a cross-functional translational research team focused on understanding the cellular and tissue mechanisms underlying chronic immune-mediated inflammatory diseases. The successful candidate will leverage large-scale single-cell and spatial transcriptomics datasets from human tissue cohorts to identify disease-driving cellular programs, tissue microenvironments, and translational biomarkers.
This position offers a unique opportunity to work at the interface of computational biology, immunology, spatial genomics, and translational medicine while contributing to high-impact research programs spanning multiple therapeutic areas. The project aims to transform emerging multi-omics datasets into biological insights, biomarker hypotheses, disease-mechanism models, and translational strategies relevant to immune-mediated inflammatory diseases, including hidradenitis suppurativa (HS) and related disorders.
- Receive mentorship from experts across computational biology, immunology, translational medicine, and drug discovery.
- Publish first-author manuscripts in leading scientific journals.
- Present at major international scientific conferences.
- Develop expertise in cutting-edge single-cell, spatial, and multi-omics technologies.
- Build a strong interdisciplinary network across academia and industry.
- Gain experience translating complex biological datasets into actionable therapeutic insights.
The successful candidate will contribute to the development of comprehensive cellular and spatial atlases of chronic immune-mediated inflammatory diseases, generating insights into disease circuits, tissue microenvironments, biomarker biology, and translational mechanisms. The work is expected to result in multiple high-impact publications and presentations while providing foundational knowledge to support therapeutic discovery and development.
This research will help advance our understanding of how cellular programs and tissue organization contribute to disease pathogenesis and therapeutic response, enabling more precise approaches to target discovery, biomarker identification, and patient stratification.
The postdoctoral fellow will lead three interconnected research areas:
- Develop comprehensive single-cell transcriptomic references from diseased and comparator tissues.
- Identify disease-associated immune, epithelial, stromal, and vascular cell states.
- Harmonize and annotate cellular populations across cohorts and studies.
- Characterize molecular pathways and regulatory programs that drive disease heterogeneity.
- Define shared and disease-specific cellular mechanisms across inflammatory conditions.
- Analyze spatial transcriptomics datasets to localize disease-associated cell states within tissue architecture.
- Characterize cellular neighborhoods and multicellular interaction networks in situ.
- Identify tissue microenvironments associated with inflammation, remodeling, fibrosis, and disease progression.
- Develop computational frameworks for spatial niche discovery and tissue organization analysis.
- Integrate spatial and single-cell datasets to generate mechanistic hypotheses regarding disease biology.
- Evaluate target expression and pathway activity across cellular and spatial contexts.
- Identify biomarkers associated with disease biology, therapeutic response, and patient stratification.
- Characterize disease endotypes and molecular signatures linked to clinical heterogeneity.
- Integrate multimodal datasets to construct disease-mechanism and translational biology models.
- Generate hypotheses supporting therapeutic target evaluation and precision medicine approaches.
- Analyze large-scale single-cell RNA-seq, spatial transcriptomics, and related multi-omics datasets.
- Develop and implement computational methods for data integration, annotation, and interpretation.
- Apply advanced bioinformatics, statistical modeling, machine learning, and network biology approaches.
- Integrate transcriptomic, spatial, proteomic, and clinical data to generate biological insights.
- Collaborate closely with immunologists, translational scientists, clinicians, and computational researchers.
- Lead publication-quality analyses and prepare manuscripts for peer-reviewed journals.
- Present findings at internal scientific forums and external conferences.
- Contribute to the development of innovative analytical methods and reusable computational resources.
- Collaborate across Data, AI and Genome Sciences (DAGS), Immunology Discovery, and Translational Medicine teams.
- Must currently hold a PhD OR
- Receive a Ph.D. no later than spring 2027
- Ph.D. in Computational Biology, Bioinformatics, Systems Biology, Genomics, Computer Science, Statistics, or a related discipline.
- Strong programming skills in R and/or Python.
- Experience analyzing large-scale genomics or multi-omics datasets.
- Hands-on experience with GPU computing, HPC clusters, and AWS cloud environments for large-scale single-cell and spatial omics analyses.
- Ability to develop and optimize scalable computational pipelines for scRNA-seq, spatial transcriptomics, and multimodal biological data.
- Demonstrated publication record in computational biology, genomics, immunology, or related fields.
- Strong scientific communication, presentation, and collaborative skills.
- Single-cell omics analysis workflows (e.g., Seurat, Scanpy, scVI, CellChat, MultiNicheNet, or related tools).
- Spatial transcriptomics platforms such as Xenium, CosMx, Visium, MERFISH, or related technologies.
- Background in immunology, inflammatory diseases, tissue biology, or translational research.
- Machine learning, network analysis, systems biology, or multimodal data integration.
- Familiarity with cloud computing and high-performance computing environments.
- Working with large-scale human cohort datasets.
The salary range for this role is: $82,000-$92,000
The successful candidate will be eligible for annual bonus and long-term incentive, if applicable.
We offer a comprehensive package of benefits.
Available benefits include medical, dental, vision healthcare and other insurance benefits (for employee and family), retirement benefits, including 401(k), paid holidays, vacation, and compassionate and sick days.
- Bioinformatics
- Biomarkers
- Disease Research
- High Performance Computing (HPC)
- Machine Learning
- Researching
- Signaling Pathways
- Systems Biology
- Transcriptomics
- Translational Medicine
- Bioinformatics
- Biomarkers
- Disease Research
- High Performance Computing (HPC)
- Machine Learning
- Researching
- Signaling Pathways
- Systems Biology
- Transcriptomics
- Translational Medicine
Our company is committed to inclusion, ensuring that candidates can engage in a hiring process that exhibits their true capabilities.
As an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer, we provide equal opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, color, age, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, protected veteran status, disability status, or other applicable legally protected characteristics.--As a federal contractor, we comply with all affirmative action requirements for protected veterans and individuals with disabilities.- For more information about personal rights under the U.S. Equal Opportunity Employment laws, visit:
We are proud to be a company that embraces the value of bringing together, talented, and committed people with diverse experiences, perspectives, skills and backgrounds. The fastest way to breakthrough innovation is when people with diverse ideas, broad experiences, backgrounds, and skills come together in an inclusive environment. We encourage our colleagues to respectfully challenge one another's thinking and approach problems collectively.
Learn more about your rights, including under California, Colorado and other US State Acts
We will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records for employment in compliance with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance
We will consider for employment all qualified applicants, including those with criminal histories, in a manner consistent with the requirements of applicable state and local laws, including the City of Los Angeles' Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance
Merck & Co., Inc., Rahway, NJ, USA, also known as Merck Sharp & Dohme LLC, Rahway, NJ, USA, does not accept unsolicited assistance from search firms for employment opportunities. All CVs / resumes submitted by search firms to any employee at our company without a valid written search agreement in place for this position will be deemed the sole property of our company. No fee will be paid in the event a candidate is hired by our company as a result of an agency referral where no pre-existing agreement is in place. Where agency agreements are in place, introductions are position specific. Please, no phone calls or emails.
Regular
Domestic
Yes
10%
Not Applicable
Not Indicated
No
N/A
10/26/2026
R422687
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