Postdoctoral Fellow – Hill Lab

Location: The Francis Crick Institute, Midland Road, London

Short summary

The Developmental Signalling Laboratory headed by Caroline Hill focuses on cell signalling in early vertebrate development and disease - see https://www.crick.ac.uk/research/a-z-researchers/researchers-d-j/caroline-hill/. Their work seeks to understand how TGF-b family signalling pathways function normally in early vertebrate development and in adult untransformed cells, and how these signalling pathways are perturbed in disease, in particular in cancer and the Marfan-related syndromes. Work in the Hill laboratory exploits the very powerful combination of early vertebrate developmental systems (zebrafish embryos), together with a variety of model tissue culture systems (human and mouse ES cell/iPS cell models), and mouse cancer models and uses a very wide range of methodologies including developmental and cell biology, cancer biology, next generation sequencing and computational modelling.

Key Responsibilities

We have shown that the distribution of endodermal progenitors results from a stochastic process where sustained Nodal signalling provides a competency window for the switching of bipotential progenitors to an endodermal fate.

The project will make use of human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) differentiated as 2D and 3D gastruloids. We will multiplex our novel Erk biosensor with live cell fate reporters to discover whether and how Erk signalling is involved in the cell fate decision between definitive endoderm and mesoderm. Furthermore, we will use multiomics scRNA-seq and scATAC-seq methodology, as well as whole genome CRISPR screening approaches to gain unbiased new insights into the mechanisms driving the specification of the mesodermal and endodermal lineages in humans.

Postdoctoral Fellows at the Crick lead their own projects, contribute to other projects on a collaborative basis (both in the lab and with external collaborators) and may guide PhD students in their research. The ability to work in a team is essential.

About us

The Francis Crick Institute is a biomedical discovery institute dedicated to understanding the fundamental biology underlying health and disease. Its work is helping to understand why disease develops and to translate discoveries into new ways to prevent, diagnose and treat illnesses such as cancer, heart disease, stroke, infections, and neurodegenerative diseases.

An independent organisation, its founding partners are the Medical Research Council (MRC), Cancer Research UK, Wellcome, UCL (University College London), Imperial College London and King’s College London.

The Crick was formed in 2015, and in 2016 it moved into a new state-of-the-art building in central London which brings together 1500 scientists and support staff working collaboratively across disciplines, making it the biggest biomedical research facility under in one building in Europe.

The Francis Crick Institute will be world-class with a strong national role. Its distinctive vision for excellence includes commitments to collaboration; developing emerging talent and exporting it the rest of the UK; public engagement; and helping turn discoveries into treatments as quickly as possible to improve lives and strengthen the economy.

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