Principal Ontologist, Preclinical Sciences & Translational Safety

What you'll do

• Design, develop, test, and maintain ontology modules and controlled vocabularies for PSTS scientific workflows.
• Translate scientific concepts and experimental contexts from subject matter experts into well-structured semantic models.
• Harmonize terminology across projects and data sources while developing mappings to external standards.
• Support project teams with requirements gathering, semantic annotation, data mapping, and issue resolution.
• Partner with data engineers to incorporate ontology terms into data products and metadata systems.
• Establish shared definitions to connect PSTS evidence with upstream discovery and downstream development data.
• Apply modeling guidelines, version control, and change management practices to maintain traceable definitions.
• Evaluate approaches for terminology extraction and mapping automation to support analytics and AI readiness.

What we're looking for

• Master’s degree or Ph.D. in Biomedical Informatics, Bioinformatics, Life Sciences, Engineering, or a related discipline.
• Hands-on experience developing and maintaining ontologies, controlled vocabularies, semantic models, or knowledge graphs for scientific or biomedical applications.
• Experience with ontology development tools such as Protégé, OWL/RDF, version control, and scripting for data transformation and validation.
• Ability to translate scientific requirements into clear, reusable semantic structures.
• Strong communication, problem-solving, and stakeholder engagement skills.
• Ability to manage multiple workstreams and deliver practical solutions in a matrixed environment.
• Experience with pharmaceutical R&D data, particularly toxicology, safety sciences, ADME/DMPK, pathology, or translational research (preferred).
• Familiarity with biomedical ontologies, regulatory data standards (CDISC/SEND), and FAIR data principles (preferred).