Chemistry Curator – Chemical Biology Services

The Chemical Biology Services Team at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) is looking for a talented scientist with a flair for data curation to be responsible for the quality of chemical and associated data in the ChEBI database.

ChEBI (Chemical Entities of Biological Interest) is a database that contains detailed information, including all-important chemical structure data, on small molecules in biology. It is a widely used resource, with millions of accesses every year. In addition, ChEBI underpins many of the key global biological databases upon which researchers in the biosciences are increasingly reliant such as Gene Ontology (GO), Rhea, UniProtKB, IEDB, Reactome, MetaboLights, SwissLipids, and BioModels. The ChEBI database and ontology is a fundamental component of the global bioscience infrastructure, recognised by its designation as an ELIXIR core resource and a Global Core Biodata Resource.

Your work will involve a wide and varied set of tasks and responsibilities, from the creation of database entries through liaising with technical colleagues to working with collaborators, giving training and dealing with user queries

Duties & responsibilities
You will be responsible for the curation of chemical data in the ChEBI database.

Reporting to the Chemical Biology Services team leader, the job responsibilities will include:

• Curation of entries into ChEBI, paying particular attention to chemical structures and the ChEBI ontology, to ensure the delivery of high quality data
• Monitoring ChEBI’s monthly release process and liaising with technical/software colleagues if problems arise.
• Monitoring daily/weekly email notifications concerning ChEBI status and liaising with technical colleagues as needed to address any issues.
• Working closely with software engineer colleagues to guide the improvement of annotation tools, access to data, storage of annotation and representation of data.
• Work with the MetaboLights team to deliver the bulk submissions process.
• Contributing to grant applications.
• Active involvement in training and external user support
• Liaising with key collaborators (e.g. Rhea, GO, IEDB) on problems of mutual interest
• Giving presentations at conferences, workshops etc.
• Contributing to publications describing updates to the ChEBI database

You have

• You will have excellent attention to details, strong communication skills and be able to interact with technical experts as well as scientists seeking solutions to their “real world” problems.
• A PhD (or equivalent experience) in chemistry or biochemistry
• The ability to critically assess chemical structures
• Good communication skills (both verbal and presentational)

You may also have

• Good communication skills (both verbal and presentational) ?
• Prior experience of chemical or biological data curation and knowledge of bioinformatics databases
• Some knowledge of ontologies
• Experience of querying relational databases using SQL
• Knowledge of Python scripting