Postdoctoral researcher in protein production and chemical switching

Do you want to contribute to top quality medical research?

We are seeking a highly skilled and motivated post-doctoral research fellow in protein production/structural biology, to join an international open science project in translational medical research. The project aims to investigate under-studied human genes as potential drug targets through generation of open-access knowledge and high-quality research tools. Part of this includes the expansion of the chemical switching technology that was recently established at Karolinska. This is an exciting opportunity to work on producing and characterizing novel human protein variants and recombinant antibodies to human targets, using a combination of molecular biology, biochemistry and structural biology. We offer a multi-national and collaborative research environment at the EUbOPEN projects with partners in academia and the biomedical industry worldwide.

Your mission

A highly motivated, skilled and experienced post-doctoral research fellow in protein production/structural biology is needed to work at SGC-Karolinska in our IMI (EU and Pharma) funded EUbOPEN project. You will be part of a collaborative research environment, driving the characterization of human disease-linked genes at the protein level: developing or implementing expression and purification strategies, designing and characterizing the gain-of-function and wildtype proteins biophysically and biochemically, developing activity assays and supporting the development of antibody and/or small-molecule reagents. For selected targets you will pursue structural studies, possibly with synthetic ligands. Your work will involve a variety of target classes, with a focus on DNA repair, inflammation and autoimmunity-related targets.

The duties of the position also include reporting and data dissemination (via publications and public data repositories). Thus, your work will contribute to the broader goal of EUbOPEN; to make pharmacological tools to one third of the human druggable genome available to the scientific community without restrictions, as part of the Target 2035 initiative.

Project:
This large-scale project is a collaboration between Karolinska Institutet, University of Oxford (UK), Goethe University Frankfurt and other partners in EU, UK and globally, funded by the European Union and pharmaceutical company partners. EUbOPEN is conducted as an integrated project with the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC). The EUbOPEN organization based at Karolinska Institutet comprises funding for more than 20 staff members. Overall, EUbOPEN has activities e.g. in structural and chemical biology, antibody production and characterization as well as functional studies of human proteins in disease relevant assays. The right candidate will have a good chance of extension.

Your profile

You have a recent PhD degree in medicine/biomedicine, molecular biology, protein biochemistry, structural biology, cell biology or other relevant area(s) and a passion for practical laboratory work. You are a flexible problem solver who likes to work collaboratively as well as independently with production, analysis and reporting of data to the project team. Experience from designing and running biochemical assays, characterization of proteins and the chemical language is a merit. Furthermore, you need to be able to communicate well in English, be well-structured and take responsibility to produce well-documented high-quality scientific data.

You should have documented experience with cloning, expression screening and protein production and purification as well as structural biology.

To be eligible for employment as a postdoctor, a PhD or a foreign degree deemed to be equivalent to a Swedish PhD is required. This eligibility requirement must be fulfilled at the latest at the time of the employment decision. Completion of your doctoral degree within the last three years is considered an advantage. If there are special reasons, your degree may have been completed earlier.

What do we offer?

A creative and inspiring environment with wide-ranging expertise and interests. Karolinska Institutet is one of the world's leading medical universities. At Karolinska Institutet, we conduct successful medical research and hold the largest range of medical education in Sweden. At KI, you get to meet researchers working with a wide range of specialisms and methods, giving you ample opportunity to exchange knowledge and experience with the various scientific fields within medicine and health. It is the crossover collaborations, which have pushed KI to where it is today, at the forefront of global research. Several of the people you meet in healthcare are educated at KI. A close relationship with the health care providers is important for creating groundbreaking top quality education and research. Karolinska Institutet is also a state university, which entitles you to several benefits through our collective agreement.

Location

The position is located within the Department of Medicine, Solna. The department consists of ten divisions and each division consists of several research groups. The position is located within the research group of Michael Sundström, within the Department of Medicine Solna which since March 2015 is one of the partners of the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC, www.thesgc.org) and its Innovative Medicines Initiative (EU) projects which in part focus on the discovery and evaluation of novel targets in inflammatory diseases (ULTRA-DD 2015-2020 and EUbOPEN 2020-2025, www.eubopen.org). The position is placed within the SGC-KI research team headed by Michael Sundström (Scientific Director) and directly supervised by Dr. Opher Gileadi, Division of Rheumatology, Department of Medicine, Karolinska Institutet, Solna. Part of the work will be carried out in close collaboration with Science for Life Laboratory (www.scilifelab.se).

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Application

An employment application must contain the following documents in English or Swedish:

• PhD certificate
• A complete resumé, including date of the thesis defence, title of the thesis, previous academic positions, academic title, current position, academic distinctions, and committee work
• A complete list of publications
• A summary of current work (no more than one page)

The application is to be submitted through the Varbi recruitment system.

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