Post-doctoral position at University of Granada: Apply for an Athenea3i-2018 Research Fellowship at the Department of Computer Architecture and Computer Technology

Professor Ignacio Rojas Ruiz, from the Department of Computer Architecture and Computer Technology at the University of Granada, welcomes postdoctoral candidates interested in applying for an Athenea3i Research Fellowship in 2018 at this University. The information about the Fellowship conditions, how to apply, Eligibility Criteria, Selection Process, Evaluation Process, etc. is available in https://athenea3i.ugr.es/. Please note that applicants must comply with the Eligibility Criteria (https://athenea3i.ugr.es/?page_id=23).

Brief description of the institution:

The University of Granada (UGR), founded in 1531, is one of the largest and most important universities in Spain. It serves more than 60000 students per year, including many foreign students, as UGR is the leader host institution in the Erasmus program. UGR, featuring 3650 professors and more than 2000 auxiliary personnel, offers a total of 75 degrees through its 112 departments and 28 centers.

UGR is also a leading institution in research, located in the top 5/10 of Spanish universities by a variety of ranking criteria, such as national R&D projects, fellowships awarded, publications, or international funding. UGR is one of the few Spanish Universities listed in the Shanghai Top 500 ranking (http://www.arwu.org/), and it is also well recognized for its web presence (http://www.4icu.org/top200/).

Internationally, we bet decidedly by our participation in the calls of H2020, both at partner and coordination. For the duration of the Seventh Framework Programme, the UGR has obtained a total of 66 projects, with total funding of 17.97 million euros, and for H2020, until 2015, more than 25 projects with total funding of more than 6 million euros. Our more than 3,000 researchers are grouped into 365 research groups covering all scientific fields and disciplines.

Brief description of the Centre/Research Group

The Research Centre for Information and Communications Technologies of the University of Granada (CITIC-UGR, Centro de Investigación en Tecnologías de la Información y de las Cominucaciones) has built up a strong reputation as an international ICT Centre. The CITIC-UGR faces relevant scientific and technological challenges, transfers knowledge to the productive sector and trains researchers to be engines of socio-economic growth thanks to new technologies.

The centre arose after the acceptance by the Spanish National Plan for Research and Development of a proposal for its creation and the obtaining of ERDF funding for the construction of the CITIC-UGR building. Currently, the CITIC-UGR brings together leading researchers in ICT of the University of Granada, which is ranked among the top 50 universities in the world in the field of Computer Science, being pioneer in this area in Spain (according to the 2017 Academic Ranking of World Universities). In addition, the Centre offers a PhD programme in Information and Communications Technologies.

The CITIC-UGR spans major research sub-fields such as: Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Computer Vision, Data Mining, Decision Support Systems, e-Health, High Performance Computer Architectures, Image Recognition, Mobile and Sensor Networks, Monitoring and Control Systems, Nanoelectronics, Neural Engineering, Optimization, Planning, Signal Processing, Soft Computing, Software Engineering & Virtual Reality.

Project description

Title: Multi-omic Integrative Analysis in Cancer Problem

Nowadays, many public repositories containing large microarray gene expression datasets are available. However, the problem lies in the fact that microarray technology are less powerful and accurate than more recent Next Generation Sequencing technologies, such as RNA-Seq. In any case, information from microarrays is truthful and robust, thus it can be exploited through the integration of microarray data with RNA-Seq data. Additionally, information extraction and acquisition of large number of samples in RNA-Seq still entails very high costs in terms of time and computational resources.

The main objective of this project is to study hybridization methodologies based on both microarrays and NGS, in conjunction with other different possible Omics (proteomics, metabolomics) for obtaining biomarker in cancer detection. The analysed disease will be: pancreatic cancer, skin cancer and breast cancer. In addition to this, in the field of gene expression experiments, NGS provides a more detailed analysis of the transcriptome (various RNA-Seq methods cover all aspects of the transcriptome without any a priori knowledge of it, allowing for the analysis of such things as novel transcripts, splice junctions and noncoding RNAs).

This project proposes a new model to find the gene signature of different cancer cell lines through the integration of heterogeneous data from different cancer datasets, obtained from microarray and RNA-Seq technologies and also, analyse the possibility of integrating other sources of omic information. Consequently, data integration is expected to provide a more robust statistical significance to the results obtained.

Research Area

• Information Science and Engineering (ENG)
• Life Sciences (LIFE)

For a correct evaluation of your candidature, please send the documents below to Professor Ignacio Rojas Ruiz (irojas@ugr.es):

• CV
• Letter of recommendation (optional)