Department
BSD MED - General Internal Medicine
Job Summary
The Senior Biomedical Informatics Programmer is integral to the ongoing operations of the Precision Health Informatics Lab (PHIL), providing critical scientific and bioinformatics programming support to enable large-scale biobank studies. This role will design, optimize, and maintain production-grade pipelines that connect genomic, phenotypic, and clinical data to support gene-disease discovery at scale, including studies using deep clinical characterization of individuals with rare genetic variants to uncover novel gene functions and genetic diseases.
Responsibilities
- Optimize and maintain best-practice pipelines for gene-disease association analyses, including genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and phenome-wide association studies (PheWAS).
- Build and refine computable phenotype algorithms for diseases, drug effects, and other clinical conditions by integrating EHR data with survey-based data sources.
- Develop scripts, pipelines, and software to analyze diverse health-related datasets, combining data across orthogonal sources — including EHR data, environmental exposures, and taxonomic/knowledge resources such as OMIM, the Human Phenotype Ontology, and DrugBank — to support genomic analyses.
- Provide broad-based programming and analytic support across a range of informatics and genomics research projects, including custom script development for analysis of public datasets and lab-generated data.
- Support the computational infrastructure underlying studies of rare genetic variants, helping enable discovery of novel gene functions and genetic diseases through clinical characterization.
- Collaborate with scientists, clinicians, and analysts to ensure pipelines are reliable, reproducible, and scalable for biobank-level data volumes.
- Generate public use resources.
- Leads implementation or modification of existing web-based bioinformatics tools.
- Provides expertise to biomedical informatics related concepts, applications, and tools.
- Performs other related work as needed.
Minimum Qualifications
Education:
Minimum requirements include a college or university degree in related field.
Work Experience:
Minimum requirements include knowledge and skills developed through 7+ years of work experience in a related job discipline.
Certifications:
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Preferred Qualifications
Education:
- Advanced degree (MS or PhD preferred) in bioinformatics, computer science, computational biology, or related field.
Experience:
- Strong programming skills (e.g., Python, R, or similar) and experience building production data pipelines.
- Experience with genomic and/or EHR data formats and analysis (e.g., VCF, FHIR/OMOP, PheWAS/GWAS methods).
- Familiarity with biomedical ontologies and knowledge bases (OMIM, HPO, DrugBank).
- Experience working with large-scale biobank or clinical datasets.
Preferred Competencies
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
- Excellent interpersonal and customer service skills.
- Excellent organizational skills, ability to maintain files.
- Proficiency with word processing applications, preparing presentations, spreadsheets and databases.
- Ability to maintain calm and courteous demeanor and to work productively despite heavy workload, competing priorities, complex problems, and tight deadlines.
- Ability to exercise sound judgment and excellent problem-solving skills.
- Ability to exercise flexibility and contribute to the overall work of the team.
- Considerable skill in working both independently and as a team member.
- Ability to take initiative.
Application Documents
- Resume/CV (required)
- Cover Letter (required)
Job Family
Research
Role Impact
Individual Contributor
Scheduled Weekly Hours
40
Drug Test Required
No
Health Screen Required
No
Motor Vehicle Record Inquiry Required
No
Pay Rate Type
Salary
FLSA Status
Exempt
Pay Range
$100,000.00 - $150,000.00
The included pay rate or range represents the University’s good faith estimate of the possible compensation offer for this role at the time of posting.
Benefits Eligible
Yes
The University of Chicago offers a wide range of benefits programs and resources for eligible employees, including health, retirement, and paid time off. Information about the benefit offerings can be found in theBenefits Guidebook.
