Principal Scientist, Translational Imaging

Overview

The Research Department at Alnylam is seeking a passionate and creative computational imaging scientist to join the Translational Genetics and Medicine Group and play a critical role in utilizing human data and clinical insights to enhance the discovery, validation, and prioritization of new therapeutic targets and indications. Our team aims to enhance the organization’s ability to deliver new therapeutics to patients by 1) deriving known and novel disease-relevant phenotypes from different imaging modalities, and 2) utilizing these image-derived phenotypes to power genetic discovery, identify and validate biomarkers, and help plan for clinical trials. The successful candidate will be part of a team that works collaboratively across preclinical and clinical sciences with a focus on providing imaging analyses and expert advice across organ systems.

This position is onsite and will be primarily located in Cambridge, MA.  

Key Responsibilities

• Strong desire to perform individual contributor work in a collaborative context and communicate findings to biologists and clinicians.
• Read the literature, derive own insights, and identify novel data and analyses methods to answer questions related to established and novel image-derived phenotype generation.
• Work with clinicians and external experts to understand and identify the best imaging protocols and ground-truth image annotations across disease areas.
• Apply computational imaging and deep learning techniques (including fine-tuning existing models) to both small-scale and biobank-scale (100k+ images) volumetric image datasets.
• Gain increasing ability to guide preclinical and clinical imaging strategy with high quality literature reviews combined with in-house data analyses, e.g. to identify emerging quantitative imaging modalities with applications to our clinical programs.
• Will be expected to manage workload including balancing large-scale exploratory projects with targeted time-sensitive requests.
• Strong written and oral presentation skills, ability to draft high quality scientific manuscripts and presentations for internal/external use.

Qualifications

• PhD in computational image analysis, biomedical engineering, or a specialized field such as neuroscience with a strong emphasis on image analysis with 5+ years of postgraduate work (academia and/or industry).
• Demonstrated ability to work with at least one volumetric imaging type in depth that generalizes to competency with analyses of optical coherence tomography, brain MRI, whole body MRI, and other image types. Experience with additional emerging technologies and quantitative modalities (e.g. spectroscopy) is a plus.
• Proven track record of working with imaging datasets, sharing code, scaling up analyses, and showcasing results in either manuscripts, conferences, or similar.
• Proficiency in python and/or R, experience with computational and cloud infrastructures (AWS, UKB RAP) and databases.
• Experience with the UKB Imaging, ADNI, AREDS and/or similar datasets is a plus.
• Experience interacting with clinicians or expert image readers is a plus.

About Alnylam: Alnylam Pharmaceuticals (Nasdaq: ALNY) has led the translation of RNA interference (RNAi) into a whole new class of innovative medicines with the potential to transform the lives of people afflicted with rare and more prevalent diseases. Based on Nobel Prize-winning science, RNAi therapeutics represent a powerful, clinically validated approach to treating diseases at their genetic source by “interfering” with mRNA that cause or contribute to disease. Since our founding in 2002, Alnylam has led the RNAi Revolution and continues to turn scientific possibility into reality.

Our culture: Our people-first culture is guided by our core values: fiercely innovative, open culture, purposeful urgency, passion for excellence, and commitment to people, and these values influence how we work and the business decisions we make. Thanks to feedback from our employees over the years, we’ve been fortunate to be named a top employer around the world. Alnylam is extremely proud to have been recognized as the #1 Large Employer by Boston Globe Top Places to Work in 2023 for the third consecutive year, one of Science Magazine’s Top Biopharma Employers, one of America's Most Responsible Companies for 2024 by Newsweek, a Fast Company Best Workplace for Innovators, and a Great Place to Work in Canada, France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, and UK – among others.

At Alnylam, we commit to an inclusive recruitment process and equal employment opportunity. We are dedicated to building an environment where employees can feel that they belong, can bring their authentic selves to work, and achieve to their full potential. By empowering employees to embrace their unique differences at work, our business grows stronger with advanced and original thinking, allowing us to bring groundbreaking medicines to patients. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to their race, color, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, ethnicity, marital status, protected veteran status, disability, or any other characteristics prohibited by law.