Postdoctoral Opportunity: Semantic Reasoning for Biological Phenotypes

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Postdoctoral Opportunity: Semantic Reasoning for Biological Phenotypes



Phenoscape is an initiative to bridge the domains of evolutionary  
biology and model organism developmental genetics through machine  
reasoning over ontologically structured phenotype data.  The project  
recently received funding from the National Science Foundation to  
develop tools that can be used to integrate phenotype data throughout  
the vertebrates.



We are currently recruiting for a postdoctoral scholar in  
computational biology.  The postdoctoral scholar will contribute to  
two important research strands within the project:

1.     Development of computational and statistical methodology for  
measuring semantic similarity between sets of phenotypes, in order to  
support searches within extremely large phenotype datasets.

2.     Development and testing of methods for automatically generating  
ontologically based phenotype expressions from structured excerpts of  
natural language.



The position is based in the informatics group at the National  
Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent), and is administered through  
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) under the  
supervision of Hilmar Lapp at NESCent and Dr. Todd Vision at UNC-CH.    
The research will be in collaboration with Dr. Chris Mungall at  
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and Dr. Hong Cui at the University of  
Arizona.  The project also includes biologists and bioinformaticists  
from the University of South Dakota, the University of Chicago, the  
University of Kansas, in addition to the model organism databases for  
mouse (MGD), zebrafish (ZFIN), and Xenopus (Xenbase).

Applicants should have a PhD in Computer Science or related field.  
Prior experience with machine reasoning using ontologies is strongly  
preferred. The position is for two years, pending satisfactory  
performance and availability of funds.  To apply, please provide a  
cover letter, CV, and contact information for three references.   
Inquries and applications may be sent to Hilmar Lapp at hlapp@nescent.org 
.  The post is open immediately and will remain open until filled.

For more information, please see http://phenoscape.org

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: Hilmar Lapp -:- Durham, NC -:- hlapp at drycafe dot net :
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Received on Wednesday, 3 August 2011 03:11:55 UTC