The Cancer Plasticity and Dormancy Program is focused on discovering the fundamental control mechanisms that regulate cancer cell dormancy and cancer relapse. Our goal is to develop tools to predict relapse and develop new treatments to stop relapse before it occurs. There is a focus on understanding relapse in cancers that spread to the skeleton including, multiple myeloma, breast and prostate cancer. The program has recently established the AllClear program, supported by a major collaborative research accelerator grant from the National Breast Cancer Foundation, to tackle cancer relapse in breast cancer. This is a major national and international cooperative program and flagship activity for the program. AllClear brings together interdisciplinary expertise in cancer biology, bone biology, immunology, clinical oncology, mathematics, computational biology and machine learning to dissect the cellular and molecular programs that drive cancer relapse.

THE OPPORTUNITY

The Senior Computational Biologist or Bioinformatician is accountable for leading a defined program of computational and machine learning research within the AllClear initiative, under the strategic guidance of A/Prof Chaffer and Prof Croucher. The incumbent independently designs, leads and drives complex machine learning and computational biology projects, sets and manages progress towards program goals, and serves as the senior computational advisor for the Chaffer/Croucher laboratories and the wider AllClear consortium. They will drive the discovery of dormant cancer cells and the molecular programs that regulate dormancy through the development and application of state-of-the-art machine learning pipelines, coordinate collaborative approaches with international partners,



supervise and mentor junior computational staff, and hold significant leadership roles in project execution, methodology development, and grant funding. Senior Computational Biologists or Bioinformaticians are appointed on a salary scale depending on level of experience, performance and requirements of the role.

Salary:
Up to $140,400 + 14% super + salary packaging (depending on experience) Employment Type: 2 year term contract with possibility to extend

SNAPSHOT OF BENEFITS

- Generous salary packaging to save you income tax on your wages thereby boosting your monthly take home pay (max. $15,900 general expenses + $2,650 meals/accom)
- Ample opportunities for on-going training and development
- Stimulating, diverse and highly international research environment
- Flexible work arrangements e.g. start / finish times
- 18 weeks paid parental leave for both parents including paid superannuation
- A range of additional leave types to meet your personal needs including cultural leave, conference leave, community service and study leave
- Discounted Health Insurance
- Lifestyle discounts with our community partners

WHAT YOU WILL DO

Research Excellence Independence and Innovation: Independently determine the computational, mathematical and statistical methods to be used in AllClear research; contribute to the design and development of novel deep learning approaches suitable for large-scale,



multi-omic analysis of dormant cancer cells, and apply established tools from the lab. This includes the development of foundation models for relapse prediction, single-cell trajectory inference across primary tumour, disseminated dormant and reactivated cell states, and integration of multi-omic (transcriptomic, epigenetic, proteomic), imaging and clinical data.

Research Leadership: Lead a computational biology body of work based on machine learning approaches to advance the discovery of dormant cancer cells and the molecular programs that regulate dormancy, resulting in authorship on methodological and biological publications in leading journals and conference proceedings.

Strategic Planning: Take a strategic view of the AllClear computational body of work, prioritising and planning research direction.

National/International Recognition: Establish a profile in computational biology and machine learning for cancer research, evidenced by invited seminar presentations at national and international meetings and by recognised contributions to the scientific community.

Collaboration: Serve as a first-line contact between the laboratory, AllClear program investigators, project managers and international collaborators relating to computational work. Coordinate methodology development and large-scale analyses with internal and external partners – including A/Prof Smita Krishnaswamy’s lab at Yale (for methods such as Cflows, AAnet and neural-ODE based approaches), and adapt, extend and apply these approaches to AllClear datasets.

Team Leadership Supervision: Act as a principal supervisor or co-supervisor for computational research students, junior computational scientists and

📌 Senior Computational Biologist (Sydney)
🏢 The Garvan Institute of Medical Research
📍 Sydney