Here is an announcement I received that should interest potential postdocs (willing to come to Paris). The location is on the Orsay campus, south of Paris.

In the framework of the ANR-funded Metacoli project which aims at identifying the metabolic underpinnings of the lifestyle diversity in the E. coli species, Genoscope (the genomics institute of the French atomic energy commission) opens a 1-year post-doctoral position in Computational Bayesian Statistics. While Escherichia coli is mostly commensal bacterium of the gut, certain strains from this species are human pathogens causing multiple diseases, especially when escaping from the gut and colonizing other areas of the human body. The Metacoli project is specifically aimed at understanding how the operation of metabolism in certain pathogenic strains allows them to achieve this colonization, while other strains cannot. In the course of this project, a wealth of experimental data have been collected by two partners of the consortium (INSERM U722 “Ecology and evolution of microorganisms” and CNRS/INRA/Univ Paris XI mixt research unit “Plant Genetics”), while metabolic networks and models for 20+ strains have been reconstructed. Integrating these data using these models is an open challenge, to be tackled using Bayesian methods.

An adequate Bayesian model has been devised, partly based on past works published by Calvetti & Somersalo. Yet, no well-normalized analytical expression of the posterior is available, and one has to rely on sampling methods to gain insights into the posterior distribution of the metabolic concentrations and fluxes for each (strain, growth medium) combination. The post-doctoral fellow will be in charge of developing a suitable sampler to achieve this task, and will be involved in the downstream statistical analysis of the samples produced. Applicants should have experience with bayesian computing and strong programming capabilities. The successful applicant will work at Genoscope within the “Metabolic genomics” lab headed by Claudine Médigue, where a major part of the upstream modeling effort has already been conducted, and collaborate closely with the “Plant Genetics” unit, where part of the modeling expertise is located. The salary is approximately 2000 euros/month.

Contacts
Prof.Christine Dillmann – Project coordinator Université Paris Sud & INRA & CNRS
dillmann [ à] moulon.inra.fr
Dr. Claudine Médigue – Principal Investigator Genoscope – CEA/Life Sciences division
claudine.medigue [à] genoscope.cns.fr