Research Technician

The post

The Faculty wishes to recruit a Research Technician to support the work of Dr Jonathan Phillips. This funded post is available immediately. The successful applicant will produce cryptochrome proteins to understand how migratory birds sense and respond to the Earth’s magnetic field.  

In The Phillips Laboratory we are interested in how proteins move, how that movement underpins functional behaviour and how we can control this to engineer new tools for medicine and biosensing. Our core methodology is hydrogen/deuterium-exchange mass spectrometry (HDX-MS), a powerful approach to examine the structure and dynamics of proteins. This technique is advancing rapidly - recently, we developed a prototype to do HDX-MS 1000x faster than commercially available instruments and we correlated aggregation of alpha-synuclein (a hallmark of Parkinson’s disease) with the rate of hydrogen exchange at amino acid resolution. With this information, we want to understand how cryptochrome proteins switch between functional states in response to the Earth’s magnetic field.

This Research Technician position fits into the central focus of the group’s research: to understand and control how proteins switch between functional states. We are looking for a highly motivated scientist to express and affinity-purify cryptochromes of the European Robin in bacterial expression systems and to perform biochemical characterisation, including SDS PAGE, Western blots, analytical gel filtration and UV/vis spectrophotometry.

The post will have a strong focus on the screening of expression and purification conditions to produce full-length (untruncated) holo-enzyme (with flavin cofactor bound). The selected applicant will be responsible for cell culture experiments (transformation with plasmids, expression and purification) and basic characterisation of protein material. This will demand a highly self-motivated individual with excellent organisational skills and attention to detail. Knowledge of bacterial expression systems is essential.

About you

The successful applicant will be able to work independently and present information on research progress and outcomes, communicate information orally, in writing and electronically.

Applicants will possess or be about to complete a relevant BSc or possess an equivalent qualification/experience in a related field of study and be able to demonstrate sufficient knowledge in the discipline and of research methods and techniques to work within established research programmes. Applicants will be able to generate, analyse and interpret data on protein expression, purity and integrity. This may include expertise in bacterial expression systems, affinity purification and biochemical assays.

The University of Exeter

We are a member of the prestigious Russell Group of research-intensive universities and in the top 150 universities in the world.

Our research income in recent years means we’re the fastest growing UK Research University with some of the world’s most influential scientists, and we seek to answer some of the most fundamental issues facing humankind today through this. More than 99% of our research is of international quality and our world-leading research impact is growing faster than any other Russell Group university (2021 Research Excellence Framework). We encourage proactive engagement with industry, business and community partners to enhance the impact of research and education and improve the employability of our students. Read about our world leading research – Green Futures and how we are transforming education for a changing world. We are located in a beautiful part of the country and Exeter (a fast growing tech hub) is one of only a few UK cities to have been designated as a UNESCO Creative City.

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