Senior Data Scientist

About the Department

Our Research & Development organization brings together the best minds in life science innovation. The teams located in facilities in Lexington, Watertown, Cambridge and Seattle reflect the full R&D continuum, from early research through late-stage clinical development. Here, we are building for the future, creating a distinct R&D community based on collaboration, partnerships, and cutting-edge research across multiple modalities and therapeutic areas. We recognize that improving human health starts here and that patients rely on us. Our R&D hub merges biotech speed and agility with large pharmaceutical company quality, resources, and stability, uniting the best of both worlds to develop new medicines for patients.

The Department of Omics Disease Understanding (ODU) under AI & Digital Innovation (ADI) Digital Biology focuses on disease understanding and patient stratification based on patient cohort data. The use of cutting-edge computational techniques to subtype patients into groups and understand disease mechanism is a key objective for ODU. These activities focus on prioritizing specific research questions about (1) the use of omics and other data to identify patient subtypes and endophenotypes (2) the use of omics data to discover disease aetiologies causal in specific patient subtypes. 

ADI Digital Biology is a global department with colleagues in China, Denmark, the United Kingdom and the United States. ADI is supporting the digital journey across all our therapy areas in Novo Nordisk Research and Early Discovery (R&ED). In ADI, we work in multidisciplinary teams – in strong collaboration with all areas across R&ED and R&ED IT. We participate in drug development projects across the value chain, from early discovery to pre-clinical development. We engage in external collaborations to ensure access to the latest research and technology enablers, and we automate our labs and processes, and we focus on developing and retaining top talents.

The Position

We are seeking a data scientist with experience in omics and genetics data to drive our disease understanding efforts in cardiometabolic disorders. You will be responsible for (1) delivering analysis of genetics, proteomics, metabolomics, RNA-seq and other omics (2) developing/implementing computational methods to leverage large-scale human omics data for patient subtyping and disease mechanism understanding (3) leveraging human omics data to address emerging research questions from obesity, Type 2 Diabetes(T2D), etc. Experience with genetics, epigenomics, imaging, spatial transcriptomics, or other modalities is a plus, as is experience with epidemiology, clinical trial biomarker analysis. 
The role will be accountable to early discovery projects initiative in Obesity and Metabolic Disorders, collaborating with scientists from Therapeutic Areas (TA), other ADI departments, Global Development and External collaborations. You will play a crucial role in driving human omics data application in research and drug development. 

***Please note we are open to hiring at the Lead Data Scientist level commensurate with experience***

Relationships

Reports to: Head of Omics Disease Understanding
In this role, you will enjoy the opportunity to collaborate with scientists from TA, Precision Medicine, Machine Intelligence, Research Engineering, Data & Knowledge Discovery, Global Development, and others across US, UK and Denmark.
 
External relationships include commercial and academic collaboration partners.

Essential Functions

• Strategic impact and influence on direction in Diabetes, Obesity, MASH and other cardiometabolic or rare disease areas.
• Lead human omics data-driven approaches in disease understanding to influence strategical decisions in Obesity and Diabetes therapeutics area.
• Act as a bi-lingual change agent for data and translational capabilities across therapeutics area and digital biology.
• Analyze large patient-derived molecular and phenotypic datasets in collaborations, to identify patterns and trends that can provide insights to understand disease biology, support target discovery, target validation and early clinical development
• Present findings with clarity and objectivity in internal presentations and publications in scientific journals
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams across EVP areas to identify patient subgroups, disease mechanisms and support targets
• Develop and apply advanced but explainable AI/ML methods and statistical models to obesity and other metabolic disease in cross-functional collaboration across EVP areas
• Engage and drive data-rich external collaborations
• Present findings with clarity and objectivity in internal presentations and publications in scientific journals
• Mentor junior scientists and provide guidance on computational methods and analyses as well as identify and drive new internal and external collaborative opportunities.

Physical Requirements

10-20% overnight travel required, including international destinations 

Qualifications

• PhD with 2+ years’ relevant industry experience highly preferred.  Degree within Statistical Genetics, Systems Biology, Statistical Genetics, Genetics, Computational Biology, Bioinformatics, Biostatistics, Computer Science, or another quantitative field preferred; minimum of Bachelor’s degree required
  • A Bachelor’s degree with 6+ years’ relevant experience, or Master’s Degree with 4+ years’ relevant experience may be considered
• Relevant experience includes
  • Experience with genetics, proteomics, metabolomics, transcriptomics analysis
  • A solid understanding of key areas such as Obesity, Neurology, Type 2 Diabetes, and Cardiovascular Disease
  • Proficient in utilizing genetics and omics tools, as well as working with human cohort datasets to derive meaningful insights
  • Experience in one or more advanced methodologies, including machine learning, longitudinal data modeling, network biology, Bayesian reasoning, or learning from semi-structured data
  • Fluency in Python and/or R, along with experience in version control
• Written and verbal communication skills to convey complex information clearly and collaborate effectively within a team
• Comfortable working with various types of human genetics and omics data, including clinical trial data, population cohort data, and consortium data
• Experience with high-performance computing (HPC) or cloud computing platforms is an added advantage

We commit to an inclusive recruitment process and equality of opportunity for all our job applicants.

At Novo Nordisk we recognize that it is no longer good enough to aspire to be the best company in the world. We need to aspire to be the best company for the world and we know that this is only possible with talented employees with diverse perspectives, backgrounds and cultures. We are therefore committed to creating an inclusive culture that celebrates the diversity of our employees, the patients we serve and communities we operate in. Together, we’re life changing.

Novo Nordisk is an equal opportunity employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, ethnicity, color, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, protected veteran status or any other characteristic protected by local, state or federal laws, rules or regulations.

If you are interested in applying to Novo Nordisk and need special assistance or an accommodation to apply, please call us at 1-855-411-5290. This contact is for accommodation requests only and cannot be used to inquire about the status of applications.