Postdoctoral Researcher in translational Breast cancer research

Do you want to contribute to improving human health?

The Lindström research group offers a creative and inspiring environment filled with expertise and curiosity. Our vision is to contribute to top quality medical research within our field in order to improve survival and clinical management of breast cancer patients. We are part of the Department of Oncology and Pathology at BioClinicum, which combines basic, translational, and clinical cancer research in an inspiring environment. Karolinska Institutet is one of the world's leading medical universities and since 1901 the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet has selected the Nobel laureates in Physiology and Medicine.

The research group

We are seeking a highly motivated Postdoctoral researcher to join our team who is dedicated to improving the understanding of breast cancer and factors related to survival. Who has a high risk of dying from the disease and why? Breast cancer is a very heterogeneous disease both in tumor biology as well as metastatic capacity and time to fatal disease. For instance, younger women are known to have a worse survival compared to middle-aged women, but the underlying reasons are not well understood. A special interest of the Lindström group is to understand the long-term risk 20-30 years after primary diagnosis since we and others have shown that estrogen receptor (ER)-positive breast cancer patients have a steady and late risk of metastatic and fatal disease. A variety of approaches are used in the Lindström group to answer these research questions, and the group mainly conducts studies by annotating information on tumor characteristics in patient cohorts and clinical studies.

The group has a large network of interdisciplinary collaboration with nationalally and internationalally leading researchers within the field. Linda Lindström is the Co-Director of the Breast Cancer Theme Center (BRECT) at Karolinska Institutet and the Chairman of the national translational breast cancer network Swetribe.

For further information about our work, please consult a selection of reports from our lab (or click on the links to our research group on the next page):

Lindström LS and Esserman et al, JNCI 2018; Yu and Lindström et al, JAMA Oncol. 2019; Dar H, and Lindström LS. JAMA Netw Open. 2021; Johansson A, and Lindström LS et al. JCO, in press June 2022.

Your mission

We are running several comprehensive and ambitious research studies. In one of these studies, we are continuing our research initiatives on breast cancer intra-tumor heterogeneity which we have shown is associated with more aggressive breast cancer and with a higher risk to die from the disease. In this study we will use several approaches to further understand intra-tumor heterogeneity of breast cancer tumors. One of the projects will focus intra-tumor heterogeneity of the breast cancer markers, the second project on image analysis of tumor slides to assess heterogeneity, and in the third project we will use single-cell sequencing to annotate information on gene expression and DNA mutations on single breast cancer tumor cells. As a foundation of our studies, we have annotated a large clinical randomized trial with genomic information and clinical tumor characteristics including more than 2,500 patients with long-term and high-quality follow-up (20-30 years). The goal of these projects is to understand and predict breast cancer patients’ long-term risk and treatment benefit to improve clinical management and long-term survival.

The Postdoctoral researcher will have the leading role in at least one of the projects and will in that project be responsible for the various parts of the project including planning, literature reviewing, statistical analytical work, data presentation, and scientific article writing.

The position is for 2 years with an extension of 2 years after evaluation.

Your profile

Qualified to be employed as a postdoctor is one who has obtained a doctorate or has equivalent scientific competence. It is considered as an advantage if you have completed your doctoral degree within the last three years, if there are special reasons, your degree may have been completed earlier. Applicants who have not completed a doctorate at the end of the application period may also apply, provided that all requirements for a completed degree are met before the (intended) date of employment. This must be substantiated by the applicant's main supervisor, director or equivalent.

We are looking for an enthusiastic and highly motivated candidate with a clear interest in analytical work (biostatistics/ bioinformatics) and breast cancer research including molecular oncology and genomics. Since the Postdoctoral researcher will work and communicate scientific findings in an interdisciplinary and international environment, good communication and writing skills in English are very important.

The applicant should have a mathematical and/or statistical undergraduate education and it is considered an advantage if the applicant also has documented knowledge and experience relevant to the research area such as:

Working with applied data analysis (for example using patient cohorts or registry data)
Excellent programming skills in for example R or Python
Statistics, including survival analysis and AI/machine learning methods
Previous experience in working with image data
High throughput genomic analysis
Breast cancer
Other documented knowledge or experience that may be relevant to the project

What do we offer?

A creative and inspiring environment with wide-ranging expertise and interests. Karolinska Institutet is one of the world's leading medical universities. Our vision is to pursue the development of knowledge about life and to promote a better health for all. At Karolinska Institutet, we conduct successful medical research and hold the largest range of medical education in Sweden. At KI, you get to meet researchers working with a wide range of specialisms and methods, giving you ample opportunity to exchange knowledge and experience with the various scientific fields within medicine and health. It is the crossover collaborations, which have pushed KI to where it is today, at the forefront of global research. Karolinska Institutet is also a state university, which entitles you to several benefits through our collective agreement.

Location: Department of Oncology and Pathology, BioClinicum, Solna

https://ki.se/en/onkpat/linda-lindstroms-group

https://staff.ki.se/people/linda-lindstrom

Application

An employment application must contain the following documents in English or Swedish:

A complete resumé, including date of the thesis defence, title of the thesis, previous academic positions, academic title, current position, academic distinctions, and committee work A complete list of publications A summary of current work (no more than one page)

Welcome to apply at the latest June 30th.

The application is to be submitted through the Varbi recruitment system.

Want to make a difference? Join us and contribute to better health for all