Research Scientist/Engr 3

University of Washington • Seattle, WA

1d

About The Position

Located at the University of Washington in Seattle, the Institute for Protein Design is a unique interdisciplinary environment where world-class researchers create molecules that solve modern challenges in medicine, technology, and sustainability. Joining our team means becoming part of one of the largest and most innovative public universities in the world. The Research Scientist 3 (RS3) will join a predominantly wet-lab group founded on the belief that experimentation can not only be used to analyze protein designs, but generate data to improve existing models so designed proteins are better in the first place. We create and implement workflows to reduce the protein build and test burden, to increase the throughput and speed of generating standardized and high quality functional data on protein designs. Our work sits at the intersection of wet lab techniques, semi-automation hardware, and computation, with a focus on increasing efficiency and capacity. We are increasingly incorporating machine learning models into our design-build-test iterations to predict protein function. The group’s focus is predominantly enzyme design, but readily touches on other modalities such as binding.

Requirements

• Bachelor's Degree in Biology, Biochemistry or related fields and 4 years of relevant experience leading the development and execution of automated or semi-automated high-throughput pipelines/workflows with DNA/RNA or protein
• Equivalent education and/or experience may substitute for minimum qualifications except when there are legal requirements, such as a license, certification, and/or registration.
• significant molecular biology experience, including PCR, qPCR, gene synthesis/assembly, sequencing
• significant experience leading the development, optimization, automation, and standardization of molecular biology or protein workflows
• strong hands-on bioinformatics or general programming skills
• experience with next generation sequencing
• significant experience with automated or semi-automated systems for high-throuput data generation
• experience working in a platform-focused group with expectations to support a wide-range of partners
• eagerness to learn and engage in new topics
• self-motivated and self-directed
• organizational aptitude to work on multiple concurrent projects

Nice To Haves

• experience connecting platform development to biological product development

Responsibilities

• Scientific platform development and project execution- 65%
• -development of robust and high-throughput workflows to assay protein function
• -end-to-end execution of high-throughput workflows to generate protein functional data
• -new assay development of support IPD colleagues and goals
• -troubleshooting of protocols
• -writing of protocols
• Data curation and analysis- 15%
• -analysis of experimental data in a standardized format
• -deposition of data in centralized data repository
• -gain insights with data to inform future experiments
• -execution of machine learning scripts
• -support the continued development of our internal results database
• Coordination and Communication - 10%
• -engagement with IPD colleagues and external partners to discuss project plans and results
• -contribute to publications
• Training- 5%
• -train IPD colleagues on experimental workflows
• Wet lab organization and maintenance- 5%
• -work with IPD colleagues to ensure lab is well-organized and that instruments are maintained for proper performance.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level