Are you a brilliant scientist? Do you want to join a world-leading Research & Development Vaccines environment, and help build its future?
This is an exciting opportunity to channel your passion for science to help shape the future of the Vaccines function and revolutionise the way in which GSK conducts its R&D in the future. Do you want to be part of a company investing in scientific and technical excellence to develop a pipeline of new products to meet the needs of patients across world?

About Vaccine R&D
As vaccine development has advanced, new types of vaccines have arisen, presenting challenges in characterization and further linking characteristics to function. However, recent development of vaccines against current pandemics or more complex diseases such as has met difficulties. In addition, the gaps in our knowledge on protective responses against pathogens are a significant barrier to ideal vaccine design and are often associated with increased risk of clinical failure.

What is Vaccines Scientific Leaders Programme?
The Scientific Leaders Programme in Vaccines is a 2-year global programme which builds a pipeline of scientists with the right expertise, technical capabilities and behaviours to drive the future in Vaccines Research and Development.

How does the Vaccines Scientific leaders Programme work?
You will spend two years working on a key development project, contributing to key strategic areas of our Vaccines R&D business. We have three location options; Italy, Belgium or US which aligns to our Vaccine R&D hubs. Working on challenging projects will provide you with in-depth knowledge of the ways in which Science and Technology is being applied across R&D in GSK. All associates will be contributing to our mission to improve the quality of human life, by enabling people to do more, feel better and live longer - all while fostering strong foundations for a future career in science.

Is the Vaccines Scientific leaders Programme for you?
This is a scientific/technical leadership position where you will be empowered to be innovative, collaborative, decisive and bold to solve novel R&D problems. On completion of the 2-year programme we aim to bring you on-board into available technical leadership roles that best suits business' needs and your abilities.
We need Scientific leaders to help embed modern Scientific principles and ways of working within the vaccines R&D organisation. You will do this through:

Project Title: Vaccines targets for therapeutics: Determining causality of non-infectious diseases by vaccine targetable agents
Project proposal: Vaccines have drastically reduced the mortality and morbidity of many diseases by preventing them. However, recent development of vaccines against current pandemics or their application in treatment of complex diseases has met difficulties. Although there have been reports of associations between infectious agents and chronic, non-infectious diseases (for example Herpes viruses and Alzheimer's disease or Epstein Barr virus and multiple sclerosis), one of the challenges in order to design an effective vaccine based therapeutic approach for these type of diseases is to understand whether the reported associated infectious agents are causal or simply co-occur without causing or exacerbating the disease. In addition, the gaps in our knowledge on the required immune responses against pathogens to treat these diseases are a significant barrier to ideal vaccine design and are often associated with increased risk of clinical failure. Tackling these challenges is now possible with the availability of disease and host-pathogen interaction -omics and other large datasets as well as new vaccine technologies (e.g. mRNA) that can induce broader immune responses that might be required for therapeutic applications.

Aims and expected outcomes:

Development of data analyses frameworks and methodologies for integration and analyses of publicly or internally available-omics and other datasets for disease and host-pathogen interaction Identification of relevant publicly available datasets and leverage ongoing external GSK collaborations in the genetics, microbiome and other areas to access relevant datasets Application of the developed methodologies and datasets for better understanding of specific diseases potentially targetable by vaccines, for discerning causality by infectious agents and for target pathogen identification Integrated analysis or -omics and clinical data for identification of specific patient populations that might benefit from a vaccine based approach in the selected disease(s) This role is expected to significantly contribute to the GSK strategy on development of therapeutic and personalized vaccines for chronic non-infectious diseases, thus contributing to a new generation of vaccines

To be successful in this role you should have:

• PhD in computational biology, bioinformatics, computer science, bioengineering or similar
  
• Expertise, network analyses, Bayesian analysis, machine Learning applied to biomarker identification and disease segmentation.
  
• Advanced experience handling & integrating multidimensional, heterologous biological datasets (e.g. gene expression, proteomics, genetics data, microbiome, clinical information).
  
• Fluency in coding languages (R and/or Python).
  
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
  
• The ability to deal with complexity, and strong problem-solving and self-directional abilities.
  
• Excellent interpersonal skills & ability to explain complicated subjects to non-expert audiences.
  
• English is mandatory. Knowledge of French is a plus.