Director, Data Science

Volastra Therapeutics, Inc. is a biotechnology company based in New York City, formed from the laboratory of Dr. Lewis Cantley, along with Drs. Olivier Elemento and Samuel Bakhoum.  Volastra is dedicated to the discovery and development of treatments for patients with cancer.  The Company’s therapies will target novel pathways and apply insights gained from its scientific founders into chromosomal instability (CIN) and its clear association with the formation, progression, and maintenance of disease.  Our lead program, a KIF18A inhibitor, is on track to enter the clinic in the second half of 2023 for patients with advanced cancer.

Volastra has raised funding from top US and European venture firms, including Vida, Polaris, Droia, and Arch. Volastra recently announced a multi-year up to $1.1B drug discovery collaboration with Bristol Myers Squibb leveraging Volastra’s proprietary CINtech platform to identify CIN-related targets. In addition, Volastra has a partnership with Microsoft to develop AI technologies for the interrogation of CIN.  The company has a world class advisory board including two Nobel Laureates as well as a highly experienced senior leadership team. The company operates out of 15,000 square feet of office and state-of-the-art laboratory space in West Harlem, New York City, within easy traveling distance of Columbia, Cornell, Memorial Sloan Kettering, and most other areas of the city, Westchester County, and New Jersey.

The Director, Data Science will work closely with the Head of Data Science and the entire scientific team to achieve the company’s integrative data-centric approach to identify novel targets and develop therapeutics to treat chromosomally unstable cancers.  If you enjoy the prospect of improving the lives of cancer patients using advanced computational methods, this may the role for you.

In your first 6 months, your team will have the opportunity to materially impact the Volastra pipeline with novel analyses informing target selection and validation using integrative methods on both proprietary and external datasets (RNA-Seq, Whole Exome Sequencing, etc.).  Your team will build unique data pipelines as well as analyze their outputs for our project teams.  You and your team have the opportunity to explore novel statistical inference techniques, which could include multi-modality data fusion (genomic, imaging, and clinical data), machine learning, and dynamic systems modeling.

You will also:

1. Work collaboratively with the scientific team including biologists, computational biologists, data scientists, and chemists to answer complex questions in a data-driven manner
2. Contribute to building a team and culture that embraces scientific excellence and integrity with a sense of collaboration internally and externally.
3. Clearly communicate key findings to members of the scientific and leadership teams.
4. Provide leadership to less experienced staff, including setting priorities, managing to a deadline, and fostering development opportunities for those on your team.

You have:

• A graduate degree in bioinformatics, computational biology, bioengineering, or other relevant quantitative discipline (statistics, mathematics, engineering, etc)
• 5+ years of previous work experience in data science-related roles at the intersection of biology, immunology, or translational medicine
• A deep understanding of statistical analysis methods, data engineering, and genomic pipeline development
• Scientific or quantitative computing experience (Python or R), plus bash scripting
• Familiarity with high-performance cluster and cloud computing (aws, Azure, spark)
• An understanding of best practices in reproducible scientific computing (git, documentation, object oriented programming, etc)
• Familiarity with common bioinformatics software and toolkits, such as NextFlow, deseq2, samtools, GATK, and STAR
• Experience working with multidisciplinary teams and leveraging large public datasets to facilitate novel target discovery and refine patient selection strategies.
• Past involvement or leadership in immune-oncology projects is a plus.
• The ability to tell a story with data (analysis, data visualization)

Volastra is a lean team of dedicated individuals working to advance therapies for patients with cancer.  As such, the Scientist will from time to time have the opportunity to work on projects and take on responsibilities that may fall outside his/her scope of work.