Post-doctoral Fellowship
------------------------

A post-doctoral fellowship of 1 year (which may be extended to 30
months) is going to be opened at the CREA (Centre de Recherche en
Epistemologie Appliquee) and LIX (Laboratoire d'Informatique)
departments of Ecole Polytechnique in Paris (France) within the
framework of the Morphex European project.

The main objective of the project is to obtain via a modelling and
simulation approach a better understanding of the structure and
dynamics of metabolic pathways of gene regulatory networks involved in
the morphogenesis of animals and plants. We will tackle the complexity
involved in these processes by using concepts and tools arising from
complex systems science. The following problems will be addressed:
provide a general model allowing to describe the underlying complex
systems at different hiearchical levels in the same formalism; provide
tools to extract concrete models description from experimental data;
provide a way to conduct in silico experiments. These tools will be
applied on real data in order to significatively progress on the
initial biological problems and will also be used to develop a
modelguided data collection process. Moreover, the simulation tools
will be modular enough to be customised or extended in the future for
modelling complex systems arising from other fields. The work of the
post-doctoral fellow will focus on two work packages: WP3 and WP4. WP3
formally describes the most general form of complex system model the
platform will have to handle (the metamodel) and proposes possible
theoretical implementable solutions for pre and post simulation tools
and protocols. WP4 is the software engineering work package in charge
of realizing the simulation platform proposed by WP3.

The core of the work is to design (and possibly implement) a
programming language that can be used by biologists to study the
morphogenesis of animals and plants, based on existing guidelines and
following close interaction with a team of biologists. The successful
candidate should be a mathematically strong computer scientists with a
specialization in semantics, excellent hands-on programming abilities,
and a strong interest for biology (or bioinformatics).

The job will be physically located either in CREA (Paris) or LIX
(Palaiseau, in the outskirts of Paris). The salary is expected to be
at around 2100 euros/month at the net of French national contributions
but before revenue taxes, which largely depend on the individual
situation and are therefore difficult to quantify (15% of the net
revenue may not be far off the mark). The working languages are
English and French. 

Contact: Dr. Leo Liberti 
     (leoliberti @ gmail.com, http://www.lix.polytechnique.fr/~liberti)