Associate Director, Human Genetics

About the role:

At Takeda, we are a forward-looking, world-class R&D organization that unlocks innovation and delivers transformative therapies to patients. By focusing R&D efforts on three therapeutic areas and other targeted investments, we push the boundaries of what is possible in order to bring life-changing therapies to patients worldwide.

Are you looking for a patient-focused, innovation-driven company that will inspire you and empower you to shine? Join us as Senior Scientist, Human Genetics in our Cambridge, Massachusetts office. The Human Genetics team in Takeda Research is responsible for generating impactful insights from human genetics data to advance Takeda’s pipeline across Gastrointestinal & Inflammatory diseases, Neurosciences and Oncology disease areas. We are seeking an innovative data scientist with deep knowledge in human genetics and multi-omics to join our team and accelerate drug target discovery.

In this critical role, you will lead human genetics projects from ideation to execution, using publicly available and proprietary data, to advance target identification and validation, safety assessment, and patient stratification. This role’s responsibilities include 1) key contributions to establishing the Human Genetics group strategy, 2) close collaboration with colleagues in various functions across the organization to drive impact and contribute to go-no go decisions across Takeda’s drug discovery and development pipeline, and 3) active contributions to external collaborations to link genetic data to longitudinal phenotypic data from diverse populations. You will be empowered to work closely with disease area leads to identify priorities and design human genetic analyses. This is an amazing opportunity to work in an inclusive and highly collaborative cross-functional workplace driven by one mission: drive the science forward to deliver transformative therapies to patients.

How you will contribute:

ACCOUNTABILITIES 

• Establish an influential and collaborative role within disease-oriented project teams by leading and actively contributing to the design, analysis and interpretation of genetic studies to inform target identification, safety assessment and population stratification in Gastrointestinal & Inflammatory diseases, Neurosciences.
• Work with a community of statistical geneticists to implement a human genetics roadmap and strategy.
• Work collaboratively with data scientists and data engineering groups to enhance integrative analytic pipelines
• Establish and lead external collaborations to implement emerging technologies and/or interrogate relevant biomedical datasets with in-depth genetic and health information

Minimum Requirements/Qualifications:

• PhD in computational biology, bioinformatics or similar discipline with 6+ years of postdoctoral experience in human genetics research. Industry experience preferred.
• Deep experience with GWAS/eQTL/pQTL analyses, fine-mapping and colocalization, Mendelian randomization, WES/WGS sequencing data analyses, and rare variants statistical analyses required.
• Track record experience analyzing genetic data linked to longitudinal real-world health data from large biobanks (e.g. UK Biobank, FINNGEN, Genes and Health, All Of Us, Million Veterans Project etc) required
• Experience contributing to pre-competitive academic-pharma partnerships preferred.
• Experience with proteomics (e.g  Olink) and/or transcriptomic data analyses desired.
• Experience with phenotype ontologies, pathway-based approaches, multivariate analyses, polygenic risk score analyses, machine learning desired.
• Strong scientific understanding of molecular biology and genomics, and ability to interpret genetic findings in disease context
• Familiarity with pharmaceutical R&D processes and one or more diseases areas of interest of Takeda (neuroscience, gastrointestinal and inflammation) desired 
• Excellent communication, presentation and interpersonal skills
• Independent, highly collaborative with ability to work in cross-functional and diverse team environment
• Solid knowledge of Unix, command lines interfaces, and fluency in common scripting and/or programming language (e.g. R, Python, Perl, Java, C/C++)
• Solid experience with parallel computing and cloud computing required

This position is currently classified as "hybrid" in accordance with Takeda's Hybrid and Remote Work policy.

LOCATION:

Cambridge, MA, USA (hybrid)