Ontology Project Lead/coordinator

You will join the Samples Phenotype & Ontologies Team (SPOT) to provide leadership for internal EMBL-EBI and external collaborative projects involving ontology development. The team delivers large data resource projects, for example the Genome Wide Associations Studies Catalog and the Polygenic Score Catalog, as well as semantic tools and works across a range of biomedical disciplines including GWAS, high throughput phenotyping, single cell projects and neuroscience. Experience in any of these fields is welcome. You will join a dynamic, friendly and international team of ~25 people with expertise in biomedicine, ontologists, programmers, data scientists, project managers and bioinformaticians.

The team is part of multiple international collaborative projects including Human Cell Annotation Platform, the Brain Data Standards Initiative, Fly Cell Atlas, The Monarch Initiative and Phenomics First, Open Targets and others.

Appointment is expected to be as **Ontology Project Lead (Grade 7)**. However, an appointment may be made as **Ontology Coordinator (Grade 8) **with additional duties/responsibilities and depending on skills, qualifications and experience.

**Grade 7 Ontology Project Lead Role will**:

- Contribute to the ontology development roadmaps in collaboration with the team leader and team members
- Perform ontology development and where needed supervise the ontology editors and programmers involved in ontology production
- Lead the agile development processes for the ontology development team
- Work closely with the Project Lead for semantic services ensuring roadmaps and requirements align
- Work with our collaborators to elicit their requirements, for example, by providing infrastructure and pipelines for ontology integration, and semantically enhanced search, query, and visualisation.
- Set milestones, and track progress of tasks, draft deliverables and formal progress reports related to milestones
- You will meet with groups in EMBL-EBI who use the ontologies and semantic tools developed by the team, to determine how best to meet their needs to enable resource and project delivery for big data project
- Represent the team at external meetings and in external collaborations

**An appointment at Ontology Coordinator (Grade 8) may be considered if suitable, and this would come with additional responsibilities**:

- Lead the development and implementation of the ontology and ontology tools roadmap
- Manage the ontology editors and programmers involved in ontology production performing appraisals, identifying training needs and assigning work
- Collaboration with the Semantics as a Service Project Lead delivering ontology tools to identify improvements to these
- Identify new international collaborative opportunities
- Contribute to the the development of new funding opportunities

**As Ontology Project lead you have**:

- A PhD in Biological Sciences or Bioinformatics demonstrating a broad understanding of biomedical sciences
- At least five years experience of ontology development (in OWL)
- Experience with schema development for biomedical resources
- Software development/Scripting experience gained in a biomedical environment ideally in Python
- Grant writing and/or grant reporting for NIH, EC or UK funders
- Experience working within a production environment gained in academia or industry
- Experience of standard development practices - VC, testing (via CI), modular development, dependency management
- Practical Agile development practices and practical experience of defining user stories and communicating these to the developer team
- Project management experience
- Line management experience
- An understanding of quantitative analysis techniques used by collaborators, for example, omics and/or imaging
- The ability to write clearly, following scientific writing conventions.
- communicate with and understand the needs of biologists & clinicians.
- Able to work both as part of a team and independently
- Able to work to strict delivery deadlines
- Able to travel to collaboration meetings and conferences when required

**As an Ontology Coordinator (Grade 8)**, you will in addition have significantly greater relevant practical experience including:

- Development of strategic plans, have worked at an influential level in multi-disciplinary collaborations and have significant
- Experience managing and leading staff with diverse backgrounds

**You might also have**
- A higher degree in computer science/informatics
- Experience with Neo4j/Cypher
- Basic competency in statistical analysis
- Experience with single cell biology and/or data analysis
- Experience with leveraging ontologies and ontology annotation for data analysis
- Experience with clinical data and/or patient records
- Experience in a service environment gained in academia or industry
- Experience in managing multidisciplinary teams and matrix working across institutes
- Experience of NIH and EC projects

**Benefits and Contract Informat