Location: Virtual, with the option of on-site work post-pandemic or continued virtual work. Concerto’s lab location: Pagliuca Harvard Life Lab, 127 Western Ave, Boston, MA 02134
At Concerto Biosciences, we are obsessed with microbes. We dream of a healthier world where microbial ecology enables advanced medicines and environmentally-conscious agricultural practices, and that starts by finding the right microbes for the job. Using a novel technology from MIT, we screen millions of microbe combinations in parallel to rapidly identify groups of microbes called “ensembles” that perform beneficial functions. This unprecedented scale of screening generates a totally new type of microbiome data, based on direct observation, that lets us map complex microbial interactions. We are currently in the preclinical stage for our first product, an ensemble to treat eczema—a chronic, irritating, and psychologically stressful skin disease that affects over two hundred million people. Our goal is to discover the first-ever treatment that provides totally safe, sustained relief for eczema patients. Concerto will go on to develop a multitude of ensembles that solve the world’s greatest challenges in human health, food production, and bioremediation.
The Concerto team is our most important ensemble. We believe the best human ensembles, much like microbial ensembles, are diverse—composed of individuals with different backgrounds, cultures, genders, and beliefs. We are committed to building a company where you belong and where your voice is heard.
The Data Scientist will be primarily responsible for designing and executing the analysis of our uniquely complex combinatorial datasets of microbial interactions in order to identify beneficial microbial “ensembles”. You will fully own the data analysis process of these datasets and will be able to innovate new methods of analysis and visualization, with the results of your work directly informing the direction of laboratory experiments to drive our discovery efforts. Major responsibilities include creating (1) standardized data cleaning methods, (2) exploratory analysis methods to quantify and compare microbial interactions, and (3) new and insightful data visualizations to communicate scientific results to a technical audience. As an early member of a growing team, your contributions will be transformative: working closely with the Director of Engineering and laboratory scientists, you will build out the core data analysis methods at Concerto, influencing upstream image processing and downstream predictive modeling. Finally, as our team grows, you’ll play a critical role in developing Concerto’s culture and putting our core values into practice.
kChip is an ultra-high-throughput device that constructs and measures millions of defined microbial combinations (see links to publications below). kChip presents a completely new way of understanding the microbiome based on direct observation of microbial behavior. kChip data are microscopy images of millions of distinct microbial communities. We use image analysis techniques to measure their optical features, and you’ll dig into these features to discover how community behavior is related to community size, composition, environment, etc. Your work will be an integral component of our iterative discovery process between data analysis and laboratory experiments to engineer useful microbial communities from scratch.
Click on "Apply" below! Please send your cover letter and resume to Keaton Armentrout at careers@concertobio.com.