[R] Summer Internship at Merck (Domestic USA)

[Pikounis, Bill]

(Apologies for cross-posting this job announcement to those on both R-help
and S-news.)

2003 SUMMER INTERNSHIP POSITION
Domestic United States residents / visitors only.

Merck Research Laboratories
Rahway, NJ, USA (approx. 30 miles from New York City)

1 position, Ph.D. or Masters student
Deadline for Applications: February 14, 2003.

Brief Description:

Help provide data analytic & statistical support to scientists in basic drug
research within an environment that is like a small open consulting
business.  Roles include data analysis (summary and presentation);
experimental design; document preparation; data management; statistical
research; and the promotion of statistical thinking.  MS-Windows and Linux
platforms used; S Language ( R / S-PLUS) facility needed.  SAS will **not**
be used.  Emphasis will be on the use of modern statistical approaches for
analysis of animal pharmacology data -- graphs, resampling, resistant /
robust methods, etc. There may be opportunities for work with molecular
profiling data as well.

Ideal candidates will have experience (and/or the strong desire to learn
skills) in statistics, computing, and communications.  The intern position
typically runs 10-12 weeks somewhere inside the period of Mid-May to
Mid-August, depending on school term schedules -- this is flexible according
to the student's needs. The median pay scale is approximately $3500 per
month, with other expenses and benefits provided by Merck.

More details below.

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Contact Information:

Bill Pikounis, Ph.D.
Biometrics Research Department
Merck Research Laboratories
PO Box 2000, MailDrop RY84-16  
126 E. Lincoln Avenue
Rahway, New Jersey 07065-0900
USA

E-mail: v_bill_pikounis at merck.com

Fax: 732.594.1565

Deadline: February 14, 2003.
* Send resume and cover letter by email (PDF or MS-Word format) or regular
mail
to above contact address. No phone calls please. *
######################

More details:

The group here at Merck Research Labs (MRL) consists of ten statisticians.
We provide broad data analytic support to scientists at the lab site of
Rahway, New Jersey, in the areas of pre-clinical and non-clinical research.
While we are based in New Jersey, we also serve Merck research sites in
Montreal, San Diego, Seattle, Spain, and England by occasional visits and
the use of web-based software tools that we have built to enable researchers
to do good data analysis themselves. 

Pre-clinical / Non-clinical means that we work with basic researchers in a
variety of human-health product areas in the long-term Research &
Development (R & D) process that occurs before a drug is ever even tested in
the first human.  The many years of R & D starts with Discovery of
biological targets believed important in a disease, and involves the
screening of compounds to affect those targets.  Once promising compounds
have been identified, much study and refinement are done in animal models
that hopefully approximate how the drug candidate would work in humans. What
we do NOT do is provide direct support to human clinical trials; Phases
I--III and beyond. That support is the responsibility of other statistics
departments at Merck.

The primary roles and expectations for a statistician in the department,
which is officially called Biometrics Research, are data analysis (summary
and presentation); experimental design; document
preparation; data management; statistical research; and the promotion and
education of statistical thinking.  Our projects range from short-to-long
term, i.e. days to months.  As an intern, one would work on a variety of
projects, with an excellent chance of being involved with them from
start-to-finish during an approximately 3 month stay.

We most often deal with data that comes from experiments where we were
**not** involved in the design phase.  Scientists here at MRL are encouraged
to be creative in their research, and that provides us with constantly
challenging data sets. We use Windows and Linux platforms for computing, R
and S-PLUS primarily for data analyses, and Microsoft Word for
documentation.  Data sets are often provided in Excel spreadsheets.
Building web-based software tools that our research customers can use is an
essential part of our operations, so that we can serve the thousands of
researchers (biologists, chemists, etc.) within Merck at its various
international research sites.


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