To understand how environmental factors affect human immune responses
Job Description
Human immune responses vary widely across individuals, with age, sex and genetics playing major roles in this variability. However, the environmental factors influencing variability in immune responses are not yet well understood. We recently demonstrated associations of smoking, Body Mass Index and Cytomegalovirus latent infection with cytokine responses to stimulation and revealed a long-term effect of smoking on human adaptive immunity (Saint-André et al., Nature, 2024). We also recently showed an impact of socio-economic status on diverse immune responses (Bertrand et al., Immunology&Cell Biology 2024).
The current project will focus on dissecting how exposure to environmental factors and their interactions with social economic conditions, affect immune responses using the Milieu Intérieur cohort of 1,000 healthy individuals. This will include bioinformatic and statistical analyses of novel transcriptomic and epigenomic data. It should provide mechanistic understanding of the differential effects of smoking and other environmental factors on immune responses, with direct relevance for multiple clinical questions and public health challenges.
The Institut Pasteur of Paris is a private, non-profit foundation whose mission is to contribute to the prevention and treatment of disease, through research, innovation, teaching and public health initiatives. The work will be supervised by Violaine Saint-André in the Translational Immunology Unit led by Darragh Duffy.
Requirements:
· Ph.D. in computational biology, statistics, immunology, molecular biology or other relevant disciplines
· Strong programming skills (R and Bash scripting experience)
· Strong knowledge in statistics (mixed models, mediation analyses, causal inference)
· Experience in molecular biology data analysis is an advantage
· Experimental work experience or willing to learn is also appreciated
Duration:
A 1-year funded position (renewable) is available. Support will be provided to become self-financed through competitive fellowship applications. Salary will be adjusted to the candidate’s experience.
Procedure:
E-mail a CV, motivation letter and 3 reference names to violaine[dot]saint-andre[at]Pasteur[dot]fr. Applications will be considered until the position is filled. The starting date is from March 1rst 2024 (exact date is negotiable).