2024 Neuroscience Bioinformatics Intern

AbbVie's mission is to discover and deliver innovative medicines and solutions that solve serious health issues today and address the medical challenges of tomorrow. We strive to have a remarkable impact on people's lives across several key therapeutic areas – immunology, oncology, neuroscience, and eye care – and products and services in our Allergan Aesthetics portfolio. For more information about AbbVie, please visit us at www.abbvie.com. Follow @abbvie on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn.

2024 Neuroscience Bioinformatics Internship Overview

Envision spending your summer working with energetic colleagues and inspirational leaders, all while gaining world-class experience in one of the most dynamic organizations in the pharmaceutical industry. This is a reality for AbbVie’s Experiential Interns.

The Bioinformatics for Neuroscience intern will work with the Neuroscience Bioinformatics team, and collaborate with other bioinformatics teams, i.e., Immunology Biology and Method Development, of the Genomics Research Center (GRC) at AbbVie. The GRC is a multidisciplinary center of excellence with expertise in genomic technologies and their application, human genetics, genomic medicine, computational analysis, data integration, genome biology, and application of functional genomics.

The Bioinformatics for Neuroscience intern will work on applying network analysis and machine learning models to identify novel targets for Alzheimer’s disease (AD). As the translation rate of early targets to the clinic is low for AD and other neurodegenerative diseases, novel approaches for target identification, evaluation, and validation are in urgent need. The Neuroscience Bioinformatics team is developing novel methods to prioritize targets based on disease-relevant OMICS data. The intern will contribute to this objective by developing and evaluating scoring metrics strategies to rank the genes based on the integration of network information and AD-relevant genomics and other OMICS data. One challenge is the limited availability of ground-truth target datasets in AD. Therefore, exploring ground-truth proxy datasets for benchmarking will be an important part of the project. The intern will have the opportunity to learn from machine learning and bioinformatics experts from the GRC and interact with Neuroscience Discovery colleagues. This project will complement the current Neuroscience target identification effort. It will be a future aspiration for tackling target identification for diseases where ground-truth targets are limited.

Key responsibilities include:

• Apply network expansion algorithms with already curated networks and OMICS information.
• Develop scoring metrics by integrating the gene network information and the disease-relevant information from multiple OMICS datasets.
• Evaluate gene scoring metrics strategies by exploring the proxies of ground-truth AD targets.

Minimum Qualifications  

• Currently enrolled in university, pursuing a Master’s or PhD in Computational Biology, Bioinformatics, or other related field.
• Knowledge in R or Python programming.
• Experience in machine learning models.
• Strong quantitative and analytical skills.

Preferred Qualifications  

• Expected graduation date between December 2024 – July 2025 .
• Knowledge of network expansion algorithms.
• Knowledge of GWAS/eQTL and OMICS data analysis.
• Exposure to neuroscience projects.

Benefits and Amenities

• Competitive pay.
• Relocation support for eligible students.
• Opportunity to connect with Abbvie leaders and scientists.
• Exposure to cutting-edge discovery concepts and technologies.

Equal Employment Opportunity
At AbbVie, we value bringing together individuals from diverse backgrounds to develop new and innovative solutions for patients. As an equal opportunity employer we do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex (including pregnancy), physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, marital status, protected veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristic.

Applicable only to applicants applying to a position in any location with pay disclosure requirements under state or local law: ​

• The compensation range described below is the range of possible base pay compensation that the Company believes in good faith it will pay for this role at the time of this posting based on the job grade for this position. Individual compensation paid within this range will depend on many factors including geographic location, and we may ultimately pay more or less than the posted range. This range may be modified in the future.​

Note: No amount of pay is considered to be wages or compensation until such amount is earned, vested, and determinable. The amount and availability of any bonus, commission, incentive, benefits, or any other form of compensation and benefits that are allocable to a particular employee remains in the Company's sole and absolute discretion unless and until paid and may be modified at the Company’s sole and absolute discretion, consistent with applicable law. ​

AbbVie is committed to operating with integrity, driving innovation, transforming lives, serving our community and embracing diversity and inclusion.  It is AbbVie’s policy to employ qualified persons of the greatest ability without discrimination against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex (including pregnancy), physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, marital status, status as a protected veteran, or any other legally protected group status.