Postdoctoral Fellow – Recombinant Spider Silk Protein Engineering & Evaluation

at  Dalhousie University

QUALIFICATIONS/REQUIREMENTS OF POSITION

• PhD in biochemistry, biomedical engineering, biophysics, chemistry, materials science, physics, or other field directly related to the project
• Demonstrated research excellence, as evidenced in first-authored publications and, ideally, receiving of competitive scholarships
• Excellent English language oral and written communications skills
• Ability to work independently and as part of a team

This is a postdoctoral fellowship in the Rainey laboratory at Dalhousie University (http://structbio.biochem.dal.ca/jrainey/) , working in collaboration with Dr. Paul (Xiang-Qin) Liu (https://shorturl.at/8xLQs) . The Rainey and Liu labs have developed a variety of recombinant spider silks and processed these into fibres by hand-drawing (e.g., Xu et al. (2017) Biomacromolecules 18: 3678) and wet-spinning (e.g., Xu et al. (2019) Small 15: 1805294; Simmons et al. (2019) ACS Biomater Sci Eng 5: 4985; Ghimire et al. (2024) Mater Today Bio 26: 101073) or into films (e.g., Baker et al. (2022) Adv Funct Mater 32: 22051778). The present project targets the expansion of this toolkit of recombinant silks through rational protein engineering, both in terms of design of protein constructs and targeting of disparate silk types. We are well-equipped for recombinant protein production and purification and for biophysical and materials characterization (CD, FTIR and fluorescence spectroscopy instruments; light scattering instrument; optical microscopy; atomic force microscopy; tensile testing; and, a newly installed solution- and solid-state 600 MHz NMR spectrometer). Excellent Dalhousie-based protein biophysics (https://bit.ly/3AvBEpt), electron microscopy, NMR spectroscopy, proteomics, and optical microscopy core facilities are also routinely used by our lab.