Post Doctoral Research Associate Proactive vaccinology SARS CoV 2

at  Imperial College London

FURTHER INFORMATION

This is a full time and fixed term (32 months) position based at the South Kensington Campus.
You will need to complete an online application. Please also see the Job description for further details.
Informal enquiries regarding the vacancy can be made by email to Professor Paul Kellam: p.kellam@imperial.ac.uk

AVAILABLE DOCUMENTS

Attached documents are available under links. Clicking a document link will initialize its download.

• Download: Research Associate Job Description.Pdf
• Download: Employee Benefits Booklet.Pdf

Please note that job descriptions are not exhaustive, and you may be asked to take on additional duties that align with the key responsibilities mentioned above.
We reserve the right to close the advert prior to the closing date stated should we receive a high volume of applications. It is therefore advisable that you submit your application as early as possible to avoid disappointment.
If you encounter any technical issues while applying online, please don’t hesitate to email us at support.jobs@imperial.ac.uk. We’re here to help.

ABOUT THE ROLE

We have an exciting opportunity for a Research Associate with experience in bioinformatics to join the Barclay Lab at Imperial College London, studying how vaccine responses shape the antigenic evolution of viruses. Vaccination remains one of the most powerful tools to protect people from viruses. Unfortunately, viruses such as Influenza and SARS-CoV-2 evolve under the pressure of antigenic selection to variants that escape the protection of vaccines. The lag in vaccine development and deployment means that at the time of vaccine administration or soon after, variants that are not protected by the vaccine have emerged reducing the effectiveness of the vaccine.
Our goal is to understand the drivers of antigenic evolution of SARS-CoV-2, develop methods of predicting the direction of antigenic evolution and develop proactive vaccines designed to provide protection against the future variants that may emerge.

WHAT YOU WOULD BE DOING

The primary role of this post will be in the development of computational methods to support the analysis of the deep mutagenesis sequencing platforms of the project which aim to understand how mutations in SARS-CoV-2 spike affect antigenic escape, stability and function. This will involve establishing improved methods for analysis, including the utilisation of other published data. This post will also introduce computational methods for spike protein forward evolution, especially those that involve large language models (LLMs).
The successful candidate will have the opportunity to develop their own pipelines for the analysis of sequence data from multiple sources and their own computational models to explore SARS-CoV-2 spike evolution.
More information on the Barclay lab research interests and activities can be found here: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/barclay-lab/