Bioinformatics Co-op (Fall 2026)

Description:
Wave needs a highly motivated, detail-oriented individual to support Wave’s drug discovery programs in bioinformatics, computational biology, and human genetics. Design and execute sequence-based machine learning projects for drug discovery and target assessment; create and deploy data and test hypotheses related to human genetics and bioinformatics; build and use next-generation human genetics and bioinformatics tools to develop oligonucleotide therapeutics. Work in an interdisciplinary team of chemists, biologists, and software developers.

Experience (preferred):
- Discovery and development of oligonucleotide therapeutics (plus)
- Working with high-performance compute environments

Responsibilities:
- Design and build pipelines to process/analyze data, store summary results, and integrate with the corporate ELN
- Build applications supporting bioinformatics and human genetics pipelines in R (Shiny) and Python (Streamlit)
- Develop, deploy, manage, and run applications using Docker containers
- Contribute to best practices for storage-and-compute scalability of large bioinformatics datasets
- Develop pipelines to determine mapping coordinates and homology of oligonucleotides to genomes and transcriptomes
- Use version control best practices for software development (Git)

Key Skills (required/preferred):
- Common human genetics resources/techniques
- Interactive app development in R/Python (Shiny/Streamlit)
- Relational databases; hands-on MySQL (plus)
- NGS analyses (mapping reads, gene expression quantification, and/or variant calling)
- Bioinformatics tools (Samtools, GATK, Bowtie, HISAT2, BLAST, htseq-count, DESeq, Salmon, STAR, Subread)
- Illumina sequencing data analysis (required); PacBio and/or Nanopore (plus)
- UNIX environment; proficiency in Python or R scripting; Docker and Nextflow (strongly recommended)
- Communicate NGS findings to scientific audiences (oral and written)