Research Fellow

Salary: Full time starting salary is normally in the range £34,980 to £44,263 with potential progression once in post to £46,974. Grade 7

Contract Type: Fixed Term contract up to January 2025 

The Rheumatology Research Group at the Institute of Inflammation and Ageing has an exciting opening for a talented scientist to join a growing hub of investgators developing and delivering single cell analytics and high parameter spatial data in inflammatory disease. The successful applicant is a highly motivated and proactive computational biologist who will work across a rapidly growing, high impact portfolio of immune mediated inflammatory disease (IMID) research, linking genomic data to spatial analyses in order to understand the cellular and molecular basis of immune mediated inflammatory diseases, and drive development of new therapies and novel cellular clinical trial outcome measures.

The post is positioned across discovery science groupings in the Institute of Inflammation and Ageing and its dedicated tissue facility: Birmingham Tissue Analytics (https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/university/colleges/mds/facilities/birmingham-tissue-analytics-unit), directed by Prof Andrew Filer. Birmingham Tissue Analytics (BTA) specialises in advanced multi-parameter immunohistochemical tissue imaging, spatial transcriptomics and digital histology. BTA’s platforms and expertise have critical strategic importance for multiple academic workstreams underpinning the University of Birmingham’s strategic plans. Hosted platforms include two ultrahigh parameter proteomic (Lunaphore Comet and Akoya Phenocycler) and the full repertoire of Nanostring spatial transcriptomics platforms including GeoMx and CosMx. BTA’s spatial work is not limited to inflammation and encompasses key academic and industry collaborations particularly in cancer across the university and internationally, providing a unique opportunity to network internationally and gain unrivalled experience and exposure.

Each of our academic and industry collaborative areas is linked to a bespoke single cell dataset, with an increasing focus on proteomic and transcriptional spatial tissue data, providing analytic challenges that are being explored alongside our established collaborations. Academic partners are numerous including the Versus arthritis RACE Research into Inflammatory Arthritis Centre (https://www.race-gbn.org), the AMP consortium (https://fnih.org/what-we-do/programs/amp-ra-sle, Prof Michael Brenner, Soumya Raychaudhuri), and the Stanford Bendall lab (https://bendall-lab.stanford.edu/) with multiple industrial partners linked via the Kennedy institute of Rheumatology funded Arthritis therapy Acceleration Programme (A-TAP; www.a-tap.ac.uk, Profs Chris Buckley and Mark Coles).

The postholder will build upon previous work in the unit using single cell and spatial approaches to define pathogenic subpopulations of cells in inflammatory arthritis, Sjögren’s syndrome and other inflammatory diseases and engage with industry funded tissue-based studies. (Zhang et al Nature Immunology 2019, Croft et al Nature, 2019, Nayar et al PNAS 2019, Wei et al Nature 2020, Zhang et al Nature 2023, Korsunksy et al Med 2022).

The applicant will be expected to work in close collaboration with the Birmingham Genomics Facility (Prof Andrew Beggs) and the Birmingham Inflammation and Advanced Cellular Therapies (I-ACT) team of the internationally recognised Cancer Research UK Clinical Trials Unit. Once trained to a sufficient level, they will also be expected to guide collaborating staff in analysis of spatial data produced by BTA.

Informal enquiries to Lisa Powell , email: l.h.powell@bham.ac.uk

Further particulars can be found here

To download the full job description and details of this position and submit an electronic application online please click on the 'Apply' button above.

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