Post Doc, Animal Behaviour (Computer Vision AI)

Key Skills

Apache Hadoop, C Programming, C++, Data science techniques, Java Programming, Machine learning techniques, MapReduce, Python Programming, PyTorch, R Programming, Scala Programming, SQL, TensorFlow

Job Description

Janssen Research & Development seeks to drive innovation and deliver transformational medicines for the treatment of diseases in six therapeutic areas: neuroscience, cardiovascular diseases and metabolism, infectious diseases, immunology, oncology and pulmonary hypertension.

In these areas, Janssen strives to address and solve unmet medical needs through the development of small and large molecules, as well as vaccines. The Janssen campus in Beerse (Belgium) has a unique ecosystem covering the complete drug development life cycle, with all capabilities from basic science to market access on one campus. The integrated environment of our campus gives our people the chance to experience many different aspects of drug development throughout their career. It has a successful track record of over sixty years of drug discovery and development and is one of the most important innovation engines of the Janssen group worldwide.

In this endeavour, we are seeking to recruit a Post-Doctoral Scientist, Animal Behaviour within the Department of Preclinical Science and Translational Safety (PSTS). The position will be opened on the Beerse campus, which is the flagship R&D center for small molecules within Janssen, investing over 1 billion euros each year in R&D.

The Post Doc position is part of an innovation project between KU Leuven (Belgium) and Janssen Pharmaceutica with a duration of 2.5 years. In this project, we aim to further improve the in vivo nonclinical safety assessment of new drug candidates together with monitoring of animal health by developing an Artificial intelligence (AI)-based continuous behavioural model.

At Janssen, the Post Doc will join a multi-disciplinary team (incl. General Toxicology, Safety Pharmacology, In vivo Sciences and Data Sciences) and collaborate with partners to combine sophisticated behavioural analysis with the latest groundbreaking Computer Vision approaches to explore, train and validate AI models for animal behaviour.

Key Responsibilities:

• The major task contains behavioural assessment, data exploration, annotation and validation of data sets for AI/ML (machine learning) together with investigating quantitative behavioural analysis and monitoring methodologies.
• Involvement in strategies with multi-disciplinary teams to improve evaluation of animal behaviour using video data and/or other sensor inputs.
• Collaborate closely with the academic partners to align the behavioural and AI-based project tasks.
• Introduce and investigate novel insights with positive impact on animal welfare (3Rs) and drug development.
• Responsible for writing and presenting of project progress reports and publication of the acquired results.

Qualifications

Education:

• PhD degree in Veterinary Medicine, Biomedical Sciences, Toxicology, Pharmacology, Computational biology, or similar education with experience in animal behaviour is preferred. A PhD in Data Sciences or Bioinformatics with expertise/interest in Behavioural Biology is also possible.

Experience And Skills:

Required:

• We are seeking highly motivated candidates with work experience in studying animal behaviour or showing a high interest with sufficient background in physiology/biology/biomedical sciences.
• Strong analytical skills, problem-solving and critical thinking.
• Excellent communication, reporting and team interaction skills.
• Self-motivation, proactivity and the ability to work independently.

Preferred:

• Experience in behaviour of non-rodent animal species is a plus.
• Experience or interest in (developing and) employing computational approaches to the study of animal behavior is prefered but not required.
• Experience with data labeling/annotating and data analysing tools is a plus.
• Experience with AI/ML frameworks is a plus.

Other:

• Excellent English communication skills (written and oral) are a must.
• Travel percentage – max. 10% national or international.