Researcher to the Department of Bioinformatics and Genetics

The Swedish Museum of Natural History is a government agency with a mandate to promote knowledge, research and interest in our world. It is a prominent research institution and Sweden's largest museum. For more than 200 years, the museum has been collecting specimens and data and conducting research on life on earth. The collections contain more than 11 million plants, animals, fungi, environmental samples, minerals and fossils. All research and knowledge are shared in the exhibitions, Cosmonova and in activities at the museum and digitally.

In the Department of bioinformatics and genetics, we are using information technology and genetic methods to study biological diversity and evolution. We are now looking for a researcher focused on probabilistic programming for evolution and biodiversity. The position will be placed in the research group led by professor Fredrik Ronquist (https://ronquistlab.github.io/). The group has a long track record of developing statistical analysis software for phylogenetics and related areas.

WORK TASKS
You will work within a highly collaborative, interdisciplinary team aiming to develop the next generation of tools for probabilistic inference in evolution and biodiversity. The work is funded by the Swedish Research Council, the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, and the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research, among others. The team includes computational biologists, computer scientists and evolutionary biologists at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, BI Norwegian Business School, Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and the Swedish Museum of Natural History. The general goal is to separate model specification from the implementation of the inference machinery through universal probabilistic programming (see https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-021-01753-7). This paves the way for the development of probabilistic machine learning, which extends partially specified models through the application of generative methods to large datasets. The team is about to release the first version of the TreePPL platform (https://treeppl.org), which represents an important first step in this direction. The successful candidate will work with evolutionary biologists and biodiversity researchers in further developing the TreePPL language, with the aim of improving its efficiency and user-friendliness for probabilistic models that address challenging scientific problems in areas such as host-parasite evolution, diversification, online tree inference or species circumscription. The work will involve documentation of the platform and other communication activities. The project runs until 2025-12-31, and if successful, can be extended further.

QUALIFICATIONS
We are looking for a candidate with a PhD in a relevant field, such as computer science. We expect you to have a solid background in and experience of compilers and probabilistic programming languages relevant to the project, as well as the design or development of new programming languages. Experience with statistical models and inference techniques would be advantageous. Similarly, previous experience with implementing probabilistic programming languages relevant for the project would be an asset. The work requires excellent skills in written and oral communication in English.

We are looking for a candidate with strong analytical and communicative skills, and who is results-oriented.

OTHER
We advance our knowledge of the natural world, inspiring to better care of our planet. Our ambition is that the employees of The Swedish Museum of Natural History shall represent the diversity in Sweden and we welcome every applicant.

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