Bioinformatician/Computational Scientist - NGS and AI Driven Antibody Discovery

Bioinformatician/Computational Scientist - NGS and AI Driven Antibody Discovery

VIB

Brussels, Belgium

About the role

To keep up with new trends and opportunities, we are seeking a highly motivated bioinformatician to support and further develop an advanced nanobody discovery platform that integrates next‑generation sequencing (NGS), quantitative repertoire analysis, and AI‑based structural modeling. The successful candidate will play a central role in extracting biological and structural insight from large‑scale immune repertoire data and in translating these insights into rational, model‑driven prioritization of high‑quality nanobody candidates.

Working at the interface of immunology, protein engineering, and computational biology, the bioinformatician will contribute to the implementation, automation, and scaling of NGS‑enabled analytics and AI‑driven nanobody–antigen structure prediction and scoring workflows.

Key responsibilities

• Analyze deep NGS data from immunized nanobody libraries and successive selection rounds.
• Develop and maintain pipelines for sequence annotation, storage, enrichment tracking, and family‑level analysis.
• Quantitatively compare sublibraries across selection rounds to identify and prioritize enriching nanobody families.
• Integrate sequence‑ and structure‑based profiling tools to assess developability and sequence liabilities.
• Implement and benchmark AI‑based nanobody–antigen structure prediction tools (e.g. AlphaFold‑based frameworks) using family‑aware, ensemble modeling strategies.
• Run large‑scale structural predictions and interface scoring on HPC infrastructure.
• Rank nanobody candidates using structure‑based affinity and interface stability metrics (FoldX, Rosetta, PRODIGY).
• Contribute to automation and scaling of the full pipeline from NGS data to ranked structural models.

Your profile

• MSc or PhD in bioinformatics, computational biology, or related field.
• Strong experience with NGS data analysis and scripting (Python/R).
• Familiarity with immune repertoires, protein sequence analysis, and HPC environments.
• Interest in antibody/nanobody discovery and protein–protein interactions.
• Experience with structural bioinformatics or AI‑based modeling is a plus.