Garvan’s Biologics Platform enables the design, engineering, and development of protein-based therapeutics across cancer, immunology, and rare diseases. This position will be a cornerstone of our protein engineering and characterization capability, ensuring that biologics candidates are optimised for potency, specificity, stability, and developability.

ABOUT GARVAN

Garvan Institute of Medical Research is an independent Medical Research Institute (MRI) in Sydney, delivering scientific and clinical impact on a global basis and in partnership with organisations that share our vision. We are proud to be one of Australia’s largest and most highly regarded MRI’s.
Our vision is global leadership in discoveries to impact and our enduring purpose is to impact human health, by harnessing information encoded in our genome.
We seek to see our world-class discovery research achieve life-changing impacts, not only for individual patients with rare diseases, but for the many thousands affected by complex, common disease.
Garvan promotes a diverse workplace and is committed to the principles of equity, diversity, inclusion and belonging. We are always looking for culture ‘add’, not culture ‘fit’ and are building diverse teams with great sets of complementary styles and skills to help deliver our important work effectively.

WHAT YOU WILL DO

The key responsibilities include:

• Lead antibody engineering projects from concept through to characterised candidates.
• Establish and oversee workflows for mammalian expression, purification, and biophysical analysis (SPR/Biacore, BLI, DSC, DSF, SEC-MALS, mass spectrometry, etc.).
• Apply structural biology principles to enable design and optimisation, in collaboration with domain specialists.
• Interpret and integrate biochemical, biophysical, and structural data to drive engineering decisions.
• Guide the technical development of junior staff and contribute to the training of students.
• Actively contribute to project planning, timelines, and milestone delivery within multidisciplinary teams.
• Contribute to grant proposals and publications.
• Maintain high-quality lab records and ensure compliance with WHS standards.

This role will:

• Develop and execute workflows for expression, purification, and biophysical characterisation of biologics candidates, including developability profiling.
• Employ and integrate structural biology insights to guide engineering decisions and support structure–function understanding of therapeutics.
• Collaborate closely with discovery teams, structural biology experts, and computational scientists to ensure rapid, data-driven optimisation of candidates.
• Build and refine the protein science capability within the Biologics Platform, including mentoring technical staff and contributing to platform strategy