Scientific Director

As part of the digitalisation of early research at Novo Nordisk we are looking for an outstanding Scientific Director or Principal Scientist with a strong background in computational science and natural language processing (NLP) who can bring value to the organisation by turning text to data for analysis and insights, via application of NLP and analytical methods.This is an exciting position where you will help scientists in the early research organisation to transform their decision-making from a document-centric view of finding documents and reading them, to a data-centric view of uncovering new insights by the use of natural language processing-based text mining. This will help the researchers to overcome the limitations of unstructured data and uncover previously hidden relationships.This is your chance to join forces with a competent information research department and help democratize external and internal scientific information and data. The position offers you a unique combination of science and information research.About the department and areaYou will join 14 dedicated colleagues within the Novo Nordisk Scientific Intelligence department, which offers a centralised hub of external information as well as tools and technologies to extract data and insights to users across Novo Nordisk worldwide at headquarter and affiliates.Our purpose is to provide modern digital solutions to the organisation and to ensure that researchers have seamless access to quality information sources, state of the art technologies and professional information research services supporting their needs.Scientific Intelligence is a part of a new area, Digital Research & Intelligence (DRI), established to provide a modern scientific intelligence, drive external collaborations and access to emerging technologies in the digital space of drug discovery, facilitate idea maturation, and develop an educational framework to drive our digital journey.Digital & Research Intelligence is part of Digital Science & Innovation (DSI), which was recently established to drive digitalisation across R&ED. DSI participates in drug development projects across the value chain, from early discovery to pre-clinical development.The positionIn the role, you will be working as a key expert and a strong advisor within your field. By combining technologies within the space of NLP text-mining, artificial intelligence, mechanistic modelling and knowledge graphs you will help scientists in early research to extract valuable insights from unstructured text, rapidly and effectively, to provide decision support. You will be working with textual documents such like scientific literature, patents, patient literature, drug labels, clinical trial data, social media, electronic health records, pipeline data, internal reports, Electronic Lab Notebooks etc.The position allows you to build internal and external collaborations, provide guidance for others within your domain of expertise, explore novel data sets and methodologies, and participate in strategy discussions.Key responsibilities• Development of algorithms for information extraction
• Relationship extraction/semantic similarities, summarization, Natural Language inference
• Neural network models for language understanding tasks like BERT, GTP-3 etc
• Evaluate the performance of neural models and validate the accuracy of extracted knowledge
• Support Scientific Intelligence and relevant parts of Digital Science & Innovation with knowledge enriching analysis results via natural language generation
• Actively guide and coach junior NLP Scientists in both professional development and project execution
• Work closely with relevant Digital Science & Innovation teams to translate best-performance techniques into production
• Setting technical directions and influencing the progression of initiatives across the early research organisation
• Responsible for presentation and reporting of scientific results
• Participate in line/digital projects progression with strong NLP and knowledge graph expertise
• Encourage, propose, and participate in projects boosting the use of advanced text mining and knowledge graphsQualificationsWe are looking for a highly motived person preferable with a PhD in Computer Science, AI, Computational Linguistics, Applied Mathematics, Physics or similar. Further we expect you to have the skills and expertise listed below:• +7-10 years of experience in preferable the biotech/pharmaceutical industry
• Profound knowledge of Deep Learning methods applied to NLP
• Strong experience with Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning technologies
• Demonstrated strong track record of developing and applying NLP solutions applied on large text, preferably literature data
• Excellent written and verbal presentation skills and graphical communication skills
• Effective communication skills with the desire to work with dispersed teams across multiple time zones
• Attention to details, diligent and tenacious
• High degree of personal motivation and ability to self-manage
• Stakeholder managementIt would also be of great advantage, if you have any of the following experiences:• Publication record in top NLP / ML venues (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, NACL, EMNLP, NAACL, TACL, AAAI, etc.
• R&D experiences on low-resource NLP
• R&D experiences on explainable NLP
• R&D experiences on knowledge representation and reasoning and/or neural symbolic reasoning (BERT, RoBERTa, and GPT-3)
• Hands-on experience on production of NLP systemsTitle and conditions are evaluated based on the individual experience and contribution.Contact
For further information, please contact Lillian Nilsson ([email protected])Deadline
19 March, 2023We evaluate applications on an ongoing basis and will get back to you asap. We commit to an inclusive recruitment process and equality of opportunity for all our job applicants. At Novo Nordisk we recognize that it is no longer good enough to aspire to be the best company in the world. We need to aspire to be the best company for the world and we know that this is only possible with talented employees with diverse perspectives, backgrounds and cultures. We are therefore committed to creating an inclusive culture that celebrates the diversity of our employees, the patients we serve and communities we operate in. Together, we’re life changing.