Postdoctoral Research Associate

Full-time: 35 hours per week

Fixed-term: 2 years (with potential for extension) 

The Opportunity: 

Help us to understand how fungi cause disease, by bringing data-driven engineering biology and cool fluorescent protein tools into fungal pathogens.  

We seek to recruit a postdoctoral scientist in Engineering Biology. The job will focus on developing a pan-fungal molecular bioimaging toolbox including fluorescent labelled fungal pathogen strains that can reveal previously hidden aspects of fungal biology. The post holder will take a lead on computational/bioinformatic aspects of strain engineering, and designing and analysing experiments to investigate these strains, collaborating with experimental and computational scientists across the team to answer the project's overarching research questions.

The successful candidate will be part of an interdisciplinary, intercontinental team that aims to develop and democratise the study and imaging of fungal pathogens through a newly funded long-term programme, entitled ‘Removing Barriers to Fungal Bioimaging for the Global Medical Mycology Community’. Funded by Wellcome and in collaboration with the Universities of Edinburgh, Exeter, and Cape Town, the program is summarised:  

Human fungal pathogens cause 2.5 million deaths each year, primarily in low and middle income (LMIC) countries. The WHO identified 20 Priority Fungal Pathogens requiring urgent fundamental research. Advanced bioimaging is crucial to achieving this agenda by enabling dynamic, live, quantitative, single-cell analysis in infection contexts. Yet molecular, technological, analytical and expertise barriers, coupled with challenges inherent to the study of fungal pathogens, prevent the global medical mycology community from applying major new bioimaging advances. Leveraging an international collaborative team including medical mycologists, engineering biologists, and imaging experts from the Universities of Exeter, Cape Town, and Edinburgh, we will address these barriers in three aims: 1) Bespoke, affordable, single cell imaging chambers; 2) A Pan-fungal molecular bioimaging toolbox; and 3) Robust high-throughput image analysis pipelines, underpinned by advanced training courses and research exchange. Our foundation phase delivered stakeholder consolidation and proof- of-principle development in three emerging fungal pathogens. The scale-up phase will broaden access to advanced bioimaging tools across fungal pathogens and build fungal bioimaging expertise in Africa. Addressing these barriers simultaneously and ensuring uptake by the global medical mycology community will propel fungal pathogen research to the forefront of modern bioimaging, enabling insight into basic biology and antifungal resistance mechanisms. 

This position is ideal for scientists wishing to switch their research focus to medical mycology. We are happy to support a transition to independence of the post-holder, e.g. developing a side project and co-writing grant applications, providing that key outcomes of our project are delivered.

The job will be in the Wallace lab in Edinburgh’s School of Biological Sciences. We are affiliated with the excellent Centre for Engineering Biology, and Edinburgh Infectious Diseases. The research programme is in association with the University of Cape Town, and the University of Exeter’s MRC Centre for Medical Mycology, one of the world’s leading centres for studying fungal pathogens. 

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