Postdoctoral Fellow Positions University Children’s Hospital Zürich

University affiliation ETH Zürich and/or University of Zürich

 

You will function within a competitive international environment that focuses on the translational intersection of cutting edge basic research and development of new treatments for children with cancer. Our diverse team primarily focuses on Pediatric Cancer Metabolism, but is genuinely driven by scientific curiosity and not limited to this space. Applications by motivated candidates with highly technical backgrounds are explicitly encouraged, even if those candidates come with limited or zero experience in cancer biology.

 

References: www.morscherlab.org; www.kispi.uzh.ch; www.uzh.ch; www.ethz.ch

 

In this call we announce two Postdoctoral fellow positions in the Morscher Lab. Any candidate is welcome to show overlapping interests and skills. Two character traits are a sine qua non when working with us: functioning well within a team and showing a dedicated goal oriented working mentality.

 

Both positions are fully funded. In the interest of the candidates CV and learning experience, however, you are expected to apply to competitive international funding schemes while working with us. Salary range 85 – 110 000 CHF / year. Optionally we welcome applications on the experienced technician level.

 

1) Postdoctoral Fellow: Intersection to Personalized Health and Related Technologies Program

 

PHRT is the light-house program for translational research in the Swiss ETH-domain. It connects leading basic science technical research groups to clinical-translational programs. It therefore develops a next generation technology transfer opportunity between the ETH domains and medical collaboration partners.

 

The recruited person will contribute to a translational pipeline to assess individual patient specific metabolic programs of cancers to match them to tailored personalized treatments targeting metabolism. Within this project the Morscher- and Zamboni lab’s bring together their expertise to assess global reprogramming of cancer metabolism and reaction specific metabolic fluxes. Applied techniques include a combination of ex vivo and in vivo stable isotope tracing. High throughput genetic and drug perturbations will ensure translational impact. Your work will be with primary human cancer samples and patient derived xenograft models as an infinite resource for technical development.

 

2) Postdoctoral Fellow: Targeting translation for cancer treatment

 

Our laboratory has developed strong interest in understanding how cancers leverage the whole body metabolic network to satisfy demands in amino acids to allow for cell growth. Based on our technical expertise in ribosome profiling (Morscher et al. Nature 2018) and whole body metabolism (Hui et al. Nature 2017), we have developed an international research program (Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Princeton University, University of Geneva) to target translation for the treatment of some of the deadliest cancers in childhood.

 

The postdoctoral fellow will master latest molecular biology- and biochemistry techniques to mechanistically elucidate results of in vivo therapeutic experiments targeting translation in cancers and pave the way for clinical application. This includes targeted and genome-wide CRISPR-screens, semi-automated large scale drug response profiling to identify combinatorial treatments and thorough single gene / drug validations.

 

Prior technical knowledge on translation (regulation) in prokaryotic or eucaryotic systems or recombinant protein expression and their application in living organisms would be an advantage.

 

Application: CV + Motivation Letter + Two Letters of Reference to: morscher.lab@kispi.uzh.ch