Post-Doctoral Research Assistant

The Role and Department

The Department of Biosciences is composed of 62 academic staff and research fellows; around 50 research and technical support staff; over 90 Research Postgraduate students and over 500 Single Honours undergraduate students, and also teaches students from the Natural Sciences programme. The Department is committed to an ethos of research-led teaching at both BSc and MBiol levels, and was ranked 4th in the UK for Biological Sciences Departments in the Complete University Guide 2027.

The Department holds an Athena SWAN Silver award. Athena SWAN is a national initiative that recognises the advancement of gender equality, representation and progression.

The Department embraces excellence in all of its forms and invites all qualified applicants to apply. We particularly welcome applications from women and black and minority ethnic candidates who are under-represented in the academic sector.

Join us as a Post-Doctoral Research Assistant at the Centre for Programmable Biological Matter!

At the Centre for Programmable Biological Matter, we are interested in understanding, designing and building natural and artificial bionanomachines. We ask – can we design artificial versions of such machines to carry out processes not available or possible in nature? The ability to design functional, dynamic proteins will revolutionise medicine. It will mean new capabilities in vaccines and drug including nanoscale medicine that can be programmed and can self-propel. We have established t he Centre of Programmable Biological Matter (CPBM) as to spearhead research in this area.

To find out more about our research, head to our website:

Project description

'Engineering Programmable Delivery Systems for Mitochondria'

This post forms part of a major ARIA-funded multidisciplinary programme aimed at transforming mitochondria into programmable entities. The successful candidate will join the Centre for Programmable Biological Matter at Durham University and lead the development of engineered protein nanocages for the delivery of molecular cargoes to mitochondria.

The project will build on our established TRAP-cage platform, an ultra-stable, self-assembling protein nanostructure that can encapsulate biological cargoes and release them in response to defined environmental triggers. The research will involve the design, construction and characterisation of artificial proteins capable of recognizing and transporting cargoes across cellular barriers. Approaches will include protein engineering, AI-enabled protein design synthetic biology, recombinant protein production, biophysical characterisation, microscopy and the development of novel cargo-targeting strategies.

The postholder will work closely with a consortium spanning mitochondrial genetics, nanotechnology, extracellular vesicle engineering and synthetic biology. They will contribute to the development of next-generation technologies for mitochondrial manipulation, generating fundamental insights and enabling future therapeutic applications.

This is an exciting opportunity for a highly motivated researcher to contribute to a high-risk, high-reward programme at the interface of synthetic biology, protein engineering, bionanotechnology and mitochondrial biology.

This role will be based on-site, at the Department of Chemistry, Durham University, in our newly refurbished labs with state-of-the art equipment. Full-time for 15 months.

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