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.
In line with our group’s overall mission to understand mRNA regulation in fungi, developing the molecular bioimaging toolbox includes both codon optimisation of fluorescent proteins and also finding out how regulatory regions of genes (promoters, UTRs, introns, terminators) affect production of fluorescent proteins, in a diverse set of fungal pathogens.
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.
This would be a good opportunity for an engineering biologist to move into fungal biology or medical mycology.
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’. See press release from Edinburgh Infectious Diseases.
The job advert and application site is found on the University of Edinburgh’s job site, see link.
Also direct link to full job description.
We expect applications to close 30 September and interviews to take place in October 2026.
Please email Edward if you’re interested - see the join page for suggestions on how to write that email.
Congratulations to MSc project students Carolina Campos Quiroz, Isa Haque-Bousquet, Likai Shi, and Ziran Zhou.
This year’s MSc projects addressed evolution of pseudoenzymes - functional proteins that are structurally related to enzymes, but whose modern-day function is different from the ancestral enzymatic function.