Position available

[Ajay Jain]

           ***** Please do not forward to other groups *****

			   RESEARCH SCIENTIST 

		    Statistics and Machine Learning

		    Arris Pharmaceutical Corporation

Arris Pharmaceutical is drug discovery company employing a synergistic
approach that combines advances and expertise in molecular biology,
synthetic chemistry, and applied mathematics.  The company's mission is
to develop synthetic therapeutics to address to address major medical
needs through appying proprietary structure based drug design methods.

We are seeking a person with expertise in both statistics and computer
science, and with a PhD in statistics, mathematics, or computer science
to join our team.  The candidate must have experience designing,
implementing, and using nonlinear statistical techniques (e.g., MARS,
PI, CART, neural networks).  Also highly desirable are experience in the
application of statistical methods to experiment design, experience in
database design, and strong interest and/or formal training in
chemistry, biology, or medicine.  The candidate should be eager to learn
the relevant parts of computational chemistry and to interact with
medicinal chemists and molecular biologists.

The Arris drug design strategy begins by identifying a pharmaceutical
target (e.g., an enzyme or a cell-surface receptor), developing assays
to measure chemical binding with this target, and screening large
libraries of peptides (short amino acid sequences) with these assays.
The resulting data, which indicates for each compound how well it binds
to the target, is analyzed by statistical algorithms to develop
hypotheses that explain why some compounds bind well to the target while
others do not.  Information from X-ray crystallography or NMR
spectroscopy may also be available to the statistical algorithm.
Hypotheses will then be refined by synthesizing and testing additional
peptides.  Finally, medicinal chemists will synthesize small organic
molecules that satisfy the hypothesis, and these will become candidate
drugs to be tested for medical safety and effectiveness.

The person hired will work as a member of the computational drug design
group, conducting research on the application of advanced statistical
and computational techniques to drug design, and developing chemical
modeling tools incorporating these techniques.  In particular, he or she
will develop software to discover patterns in the biological activity of
massive libraries of biopolymer compounds, and to predict new compounds
with enhanced activity.  In addition, he or she will contribute
statistical expertise to experiment design and to other machine learning
projects in the company.  

The computational drug design team currently includes Barr Bauer, David
Chapman, Roger Critchlow, Tom Dietterich, Ajay Jain, Kimberle Koile,
Rick Lathrop, Tomas Lozano Perez, and John Park.

For more information, send your resume with the names and addresses of
three references to:

   Arris Pharmaceutical Corporation
   Personnel Manager
   385 Oyster Point Blvd.
   South San Francisco CA 94080

You may also send email reponses to jain at arris.com.