2025 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. 

Bioinformatics for Neuroscience Intern 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 Interns.

The Bioinformatics for Neuroscience intern will work with the Neuroscience Bioinformatics team 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. 

Several recent single-cell eQTL studies (AbbVie internal and public) have revealed cell type specific variants that are linked to Alzheimer's Disease (AD). The Neuroscience Discovery team prioritized colocalized genes to identify potential drug targets in microglia, the innate immune cells of the brain that undergo inflammation response in AD. However, genetic regulation of gene expression under GWAS loci is often complex, often extending to multiple casual variants or presenting under specific disease context. Many of these implicated variants are non-coding variants and linking them to potential target genes requires using other assays. For this purpose, we can leverage on our high coverage microglia eQTL study and use publicly available chromatin conformation data from microglia to find associations between regions with shortlisted variants and promoters of AD relevant protein coding genes.

The internship project will focus on target identification for Alzheimer’s Disease through a deep dive into brain cell type specific eQTL information. This project will involve: 

• Collecting datasets: microglia relevant variants from our internal eQTL study and microglia promoter-capture Hi-C from manuscript 
• Analysis: identify variants that are eQTLs, extending to disease specific or microglia subtype specific, and perform colocalization analysis under the assumption of more than one casual variant
• Analysis: filter variants that overlap with peaks in Hi-C and identify risk genes associated with the promoters 
• Filtering: shortlist relevant genes by using information from other single-nuclei RNAseq and consortium studies 
• Pitch: share results with Neuroscience stakeholders to do a deep dive on the prioritized targets and perform knock-out experiments in microglia to understand the biology and pathways involved  

Minimum Qualifications 

• Currently enrolled in university, pursuing a PhD in Bioinformatics, Computational Biology or other related field
• Must be enrolled in university for at least one semester following the internship
• Knowledge in R or Python programming  
• Strong written, verbal and oral communication skills, good self-organization 
• Strong quantitative and analytical skills 

Preferred Qualifications

• Expected graduation date between December 2025 – July 2026
• Exposure to eQTL and chromatin conformation data analysis
• Exposure to neuroscience projects

Benefits and Amenities

• Competitive pay
• Relocation support for eligible students
• Select wellness benefits and paid holiday / sick time
• 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. ​

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AbbVie is an equal opportunity employer and 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.

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