Data Science Intern – Soger Lab (Havard Medical School) at Marconi Research and Innovations Lab

Job Description Terms of Employment• Unpaid internship for a duration of 2 months Description• The Laboratory of Systems Pharmacology (LSP) at the Harvard Medical School (HMS) is a National Institute of General Medical Sciences Center for Systems Biology which bring together multi-disciplinary scientists to reinvent the fundamental science underlying the development of new medicines and their use in individual patients. Every cell is an extensively interconnected ecosystem. Any given gene may influence dozens or hundreds of other genes. At the LSP, the drug action is investigated at the level of the entire biochemical and genetic networks, rather than looking at the effect of any single element. The LSP brings together investigators in mathematical and experimental disciplines from multiple academic institutions (Harvard, MIT, Tufts) and research hospitals (Dana Farber, MGH, BWH), as well as visiting scientists from the FDA and local drug companies, to integrate computational and systems approach into all phases of drug discovery and development.Duties and Responsibilities• The goal of the internship is to further develop an imaging pipeline for the automated• segmentation and analysis of microscopy images of three melanoma cellular models used to• study the emergence of resistance to targeted therapy. During this internship, the student will:• Read up and understand the basics of cell signaling and the role of BRAF inhibitors in• cancer treatment.• Starting from an existing preliminary image analysis pipeline, developing a pipeline for• robust segmentation of the full cell body from bright field images using segmentation• tools such as Stardist and Cellpose.• Apply this image analysis pipeline to experimental data provided by the LSP to extract• single-cell features from timelapse movies of cells treated with BRAF inhibitors.• Perform explorative data analysis on the provided experimental data and visualize the• results to identify potential markers of drug-resistant cells.• The work will be mostly done using Python. Basic experience with Python, as well as basic• Biology and image processing is an advantages.Qualifications• 2nd or 3rd year of study at Makerere University with a computing and data science background