Job Detail

At Roche, we believe in the urgency of delivering medical solutions right now – even as we develop innovations for the future. We are passionate about transforming patients’ lives and we are fearless in both decision-making and taking action. And we believe that good business means a better world.

That is why we come to work every single day. We commit ourselves to scientific rigour, unassailable ethics, and access to medical innovations for all. We do this today to build a better tomorrow.

About this position

The Roche Postdoctoral Fellowship (RPF) program seeks to support excellent early-career scientists focusing on collaborative R&D projects between Roche and international academic institutions. Both internal Roche and external academic experts act as mentors, and you will be based primarily at Roche Innovation Centre Basel, Switzerland.

The aim of this project is to mine social media using natural language processing (NLP) in order to produce quantitative insights that can help to understand disease burden and its impact on patients’ lives. These insights will inform preclinical research and clinical study design.

The position is within the Data Science group of the Pharmaceutical Research and Early Development (pRED) department at Roche. You will also work closely with other groups and postdocs within Roche.

In this position you will

• Plan and deploy data collection pipelines from Twitter, Reddit, and other social media sources, in collaboration with clinical experts at Roche and other institutions


• Develop, deploy and evaluate NLP methods to extract relevant information from social media sources


• Coordinate annotation efforts for development and evaluation of the NLP methods


• Use statistical methods to analyze the data extracted and derive the patient’s view about their disease


• Help bring the insights gained into the drug R&D process


• Write and publish high quality manuscripts in peer reviewed journals as first author and in collaboration with mentors, clinicians, and other postdocs

Who you are

We are keen to discover talents who are hungry for knowledge. At the Roche Headquarter site in Basel, employees from over 90 countries are doing now what patients need next. We contribute our share towards achieving our mission and to make our vision of personalized healthcare happen. We offer you a multicultural workplace in a modern environment, which at the same time requires you to be open-minded and adaptable. This also means that you continuously contrast your results with others and acknowledge the benefit of collaborations and communications.

What you bring in your toolbox

• A recent PhD in biomedical informatics, computer science, statistics, epidemiology or a related field (max 3 years after completing PhD)


• Programming experience in Python (preferred) or R


• A first-author, peer-reviewed publication record


• Experience in natural language processing and text analytics, preferably with social media


• Experience in analysis of clinical data or interest in learning


• Proficiency in spoken and written English


• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills / ability to build good working relationships

To be considered, please send us your application including

• CV


• Motivation Letter (including desired start date)

The preferred starting date is in March or April 2020.

Roche embraces diversity and equal opportunity in a serious way. We are dedicated to building a team that represents a range of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills. The more inclusive we are, the better our work will be.

If you still have questions, then please check our FAQs and videos on careers.roche.ch/faq

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