Lead Scientist – Genetics, Epidemiology

As a Lead Scientist you will bring your own scientific expertise and apply it to this project to impact our understanding of how what we eat effects our long term health; with direct access to some of the most respected scientists within their field, develop further relationships with the wider academic community, contribute to leading research papers, whilst also applying this research to meaningful which will help the broader population enjoy the health benefits of this work.

About Project Sapiens

We are combining world-class science and the latest machine learning to predict personalised metabolic responses to individual foods. To achieve this we are intelligently combining data from published research, our own clinical studies and direct consumer engagement. We are a very well-funded new start-up (currently in stealth) from a team that has built billion-dollar revenue businesses from scratch, beaten Google on its home turf of machine learning for advertising, and includes some of the 1% most cited scientists in the world.

Project Sapiens started with data from the TwinsUK Study, the most studied group of people on the planet. The depth of molecular and health data in the 13000 person cohort is unique, ranging from body composition scans to multiple omics datasets derived from half a million biological samples collected over the past 25 years such as blood, urine and stool. These datasets are now being extended with our PREDICT Study, the largest nutritional study of its kind ever undertaken, measuring individuals’ unique metabolic responses to different meals. PREDICT is taking place at King’s College London on twins from the TwinsUK Study.

About the Role:

The Lead Scientist will help define and own the scientific agenda within the Company and help translate this research through our engineering and machine learning teams into our Product Roadmap .

Join us in tackling wide-ranging scientific challenges and becoming the day to day owner of our science internally. You will be coordinating our world class SAB team from universities including Oxford, Harvard and King’s College London, which includes two of the world’s leading teams in microbiome analysis, and leading scientists in areas as diverse as diabetes, lipid responses and cardiovascular health. You will be working daily with our core scientists, with the operational teams, to ensure the progression of projects from concept to clinical testing. Providing scientific insight to our internal machine learning team. Your role is to ensure we are doing the best possible science, knitting together the different specialities, interpreting it correctly and using the results to drive the next set of science experiments and helping the machine learning team achieve its objectives.

Your background:

You will have worked as a senior post-doc at a top-tier university. Your background will be in life sciences or medical sciences with a strong quantitative approach to research. A background in subjects like bioinformatics, epidemiology or genetics would be attractive. Experience of working with clinical studies would be a significant plus, as is microbiome experience. You do not need to have prior commercial experience. You do not need to have experience working with machine learning, but you do need to have a strong quantitative background, ideally working with big data, and be very comfortable playing with numbers.

Your skills:

• You are good with people and outgoing. You will need to spend a lot of time working with many people, teasing out their insights and combining different perspectives from different experts to come up with the right solution.
• You are extremely smart. We are solving new, difficult problems with a world-class team.
• You are a very quick learner. You will be covering very broad scientific areas where you will need to learn very fast and obtain a high level of expertise - and none of our current scientists individually are expert in all of these areas.
• You will know what a good scientific study looks like, and be capable of design and driving new studies
• You will be confident in reading and translating scientific academic papers
• You move fast. This is a start-up not an academic setting. We do things fast, but accurately
• Organised. You will be coordinating many different areas.
• Very confident with numbers.

Your current role:

We don’t really mind. We suspect you may be a bit bored/frustrated with a pure academic life and want to do something with more immediate impact on peoples lives. You may have already done things on the edge of academia/industry or in industry, but this isn’t required

The opportunity to work with and contribute to thought leading science.

We are a well funded early stage StartUp Company, who will pay competitive salaries plus options