A research opportunity is currently available in the Mycotoxin Prevention and Applied Microbiology (MPM) Research Unit, National Center for Agricultural Utilization Research (NCAUR), Peoria, Illinois. The Agricultural Research Service (ARS) is the U.S. Department of Agriculture's chief scientific in-house research agency with a mission to find solutions to agricultural problems that affect Americans every day from field to table. The goal of the Mycotoxin Prevention and Applied Microbiology (MPM) Research Unit is to enhance food safety by conducting research to develop strategies to control fungal disease in cereal crops and eliminate the risk of harmful fungal contaminants in food and feed. Candidate will work with Dr. Hye-Seon Kim (hyeseon.kim@usda.gov).

The incumbent will conduct research to develop ways to detect Fusarium mycotoxigenic fungi and assess the potential impact of new and emerging Fusarium-induced crop diseases. The specific project objective will to identify the function of Fusarium BGCs to limit impact of emerging Fusarium crop diseases by applying novel statistical machine learning (ML) techniques across diverse molecular and Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) datasets. The incumbent will be involved in developing ML and/or Deep Learning models and algorithms on NGS datasets including genomic, transcriptomic and metabolomic data. Incumbent also analyzes multi-omic data to assess impact of a Fusarium-induced crop diseases and mycotoxin contamination and to identify strategies to mitigate these agricultural problems. MPM scientists conduct research in computational biology (Bioinformatics), genetics, microbiology, chemistry and plant pathology to produce information and technologies to enhance food safety and crop production in the U.S. and around the world.