Researcher: Genomic Evaluations Project Manager (5 years fixed term)

SRUC is unique in Scotland and one of the largest organisations of its kind in Europe. Our ambitious and exciting vision is to work at local, national and international levels, leading innovation and sustainable development in agriculture and rural sectors.

As part of the Government’s Agri-tech Strategy published in 2013, Innovate UK (https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/innovate-uk) has established four agricultural innovation centres. The largest of these, CIEL, is a partnership of the UK’s leading academic and industry players in the field of livestock, and will develop and coordinate a network of state-of-the-art facilities dedicated to delivering cutting edge research to the UK’s livestock sector. CIEL has been established as a Company Limited by Guarantee.

Edinburgh Genetic Evaluation Services (EGENES) is a discreet unit within SRUC with ICAR accreditation with 7 geneticists and programmers that provides UK national genetic and genomic evaluations for farmed livestock. It is tightly integrated with the Animal Breeding and Genomics Team to ensure that research results are rapidly implemented farmers and breeding companies. Researchers also benefit from professional data handling expertise in EGENES. The entire team constitutes around 25.

CIEL has awarded EGENES funds to develop a new genomic evaluation system for dairy, beef, sheep and goats over a 4 year period.

We are seeking a senior programmer/project manager to work in EGENES to redevelop a completely new genomic evaluation system that will be used to produce timely and accurate genomic evaluations to international (Interbull and ICAR) standards. The team will engage in the implementation of genomic selection in dairy, beef, goats and sheep. The successful candidate will manage and work within this team that will number 5 within 12 months and will collaborate with colleagues based in SRUC and the Roslin Institute and others working in the breeding of farmed livestock.

The new system will utilise appropriately high powered and configured heterogeneous computing facilities that incorporate CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs. We utilise the largest reference population of Holstein bulls in the world and are rapidly accumulating beef, goat and sheep genotypes. The successful candidates will work with data and databases tens of terabytes in size and containing tables of