Metabolomics is an emerging systems biology field that provides a detailed chemical profile of small-molecule metabolites in a biological system, delivering new approaches for disease diagnosis and treatment and furthering the understanding of disease etiology. The advent of high-resolution mass spectrometers and advanced data analysis tools has aided the growth of the field by significantly expanding metabolome coverage; however, the complexity of the metabolome still poses significant analytical challenges. Additionally, analytical data from instrumental platforms can be more variable than the actual biological changes being probed in metabolomics investigations, which is a roadblock to commercial translation of findings. 

Research in this area will focus on the development and characterization of new reference materials to assist in reducing measurement variance in the metabolomics community and allow for interlaboratory comparison of data; application of new analytical methodology for metabolomics studies in human health and precision medicine applications as well as food and nutrition, biomanufacturing, and forensic science, including liquid or gas chromatography and/or ambient ionization mass spectrometry; and advanced chemometric tools for the analysis, interpretation, and comparison of complex metabolomic data sets. https://www.nist.gov/programs-projects/metabolomics-quality-assurance-and-quality-control-materials-metqual-program

key words

Metabolites; Metabolic pathways; Mass spectrometry; Bioinformatics; Chemometrics; Multivariate statistics; Human health; Precision medicine; Foodomics; Forensic science

Citizenship:  Open to U.S. citizens

Level:  Open to Postdoctoral applicants