The Immunology (IMM) Disease Area within Biomedical Research (BR) at Novartis in Basel is seeking a highly motivated postgraduate to join our Data Science team for an internship to establish and benchmark computational tools for the analysis of multiplexed imaging and other tissue profiling technologies including spatial transcriptomics.

The IMM Data Science team collaborates with project teams across IMM on a variety of clinical and preclinical drug discovery programs targeting autoimmune diseases and chronic inflammation. With the advancement of multiplexed imaging and spatial transcriptomics technologies, we are now expanding our internal pipelines to provide a flexible and scalable solution to analyze spatial tissue data across projects.

Your responsibilities will include:

• Establish and evaluate existing computational tools to handle and analyze spatial tissue data
• Compare existing analysis approaches in terms of usability, flexibility and scalability
• Apply the selected tools to internal data supporting the identification of disease-relevant tissue structures
• Present the results internally within IMM and the broader tissue profiling community at BR.

Essential Requirements:

• Recent master’s degree (MSc) in bioinformatics, computational biology, data science or a related field
• Excellent skills in data handling and analysis using Python; Experience with Unix command line and pipelining solutions (e.g. snakemake/nextflow)
• Ability to work independently and as part of an interdisciplinary team
• English: proficient in oral and written.

Desirable Requirements:

• Previous experience with analyzing low- or highplexed imaging data; Experience analyzing spatial transcriptomics and applying spatial statistics is a plus
• Good understanding of biology and immunology.