Cheminformatics/Metabolism PhD position at EBI
Image courtesy of emhuwar
The Cheminformatics and Metabolism group at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in Hinxton, Cambridge, Uk, has an opening for a phd position. The EBI is one of four outstations of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and is a great place to do research in chemistry, cheminformatics and drug discovery. In all of these areas, the really exciting stuff is done at the boundaries of molecular biology, chemistry, nanoscience, etc, and EMBL is the place for such interdisciplinary research. The really cool thing and a well-hidden secret: The successful candidate will be enrolled at the University of Cambridge and eventually get a phd from UCam. Back to the records:
The Steinbeck group does research in metabolism, natural products and cheminformatics algorithm development. The successful candidate is free to choose from a range of topics (see below) or suggest his or her own project.
Applications need to be submitted by 15 July 2009 through the EMBL phd programme and ideally the candidate should clearly indicate that he/she has a preference to work with us here at the EBI.
Here are a two suggestions for potential projects
a) Structure elucidation of unknown metabolites based on mass spectrometry or proton NMR. This topic is of great importance for Metabolomics and metabolism research in general, both of which are current hot topics in molecular biology. We have a long standing history of research in this area (see our publication list) and the candidate will be able to build on existing knowledge.
b) Intelligent systems for extracting information from the chemical literature
A vast amount of knowledge is hidden in more than 100 years of chemical literature – knowledge which needs to be semantically annotated and made discoverable and interpretable by computational algorithms. Now, a scientific article in chemistry is a complex mixture of different information and data types. It contains plain text, analytical numerical data in various flavours as well as graphics of all kinds. Methods have been developed to extract of re-discover information from either of these areas. The project here aims at combining information extracted from text, tables and graphics and using each of the areas to validate data from any of the other areas.
Categorised as: Blue Obelisk, Chemoinformatics, Open Science, Publishing
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