Job Description

Terms: Full time, Fixed Term Contract for 2 years

Closing Date: 12 September, 2023 - 12:00 noon

Interview date: 27 September 2023

Change your career, change lives

The Open University is the UK\'s largest university, a world leader in flexible part-time education combining a mission to widen access to higher education with research excellence, transforming lives through education.

The School of Life, Health and Chemical Sciences (LHCS) is part of the Faculty of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). It brings together a multi-disciplinary team of academics with expertise in neurobiology, psychology, immunology, genetics, and cellular and molecular biology, as well as organic, medicinal, inorganic and materials chemistry, providing a stimulating, collaborative and supportive teaching and research environment. The School offers undergraduate qualifications in Biology, Chemistry, Health Sciences and Natural Sciences and a postgraduate qualification in Mental Health Sciences, as well as hosting PhD students. Members of the School were submitted to REF2021 in Units of Assessment A3 (Allied Health Professions) and B12 (Engineering). For more information about our School, our research and our facilities please see .

The role

The Open University is recruiting a Post-Doctoral Research Associate (PDRA) to work on an exciting project. The PDRA will employ cell culture, pharmacology, molecular biology and bioinformatic techniques to study prostate cancer epigenetics and to identify personalised treatment for this disease. The PDRA will be part of an international team of academic and industrial experts based in the UK, Europe and North America. The post holder will work in the Cancer Epigenetics Laboratory, directed by . The post holder will be expected to acquire and interpret pharmacological data, to publish high quality experimental manuscripts and to present the results at international conferences.

The PDRA will screen new epigenetic compounds for the treatment of neuroendocrine prostate cancer. The PDRA will also employ molecular biology and next-generation sequencing to dissect the mechanism of action of selected compounds.

The PDRA will collect data in LHCS labs, analyse them and present them at conferences and will be expected to publish the result in relevant Journals.

Skills and experience

Essential skills:

• PhD or equivalent title, in a relevant discipline (e.g. cancer biology, pharmacology, epigenetics)
• Previous experience with cancer cell culture
• Demonstrable experience in publishing high quality research outputs
• Good communication skills

• Previous experience with pharmacology experiments (synergism studies, drug screening)
• Previous experience with Western Blot and/or apoptosis assays
• Ability to analyse RNA Seq and/or ATAC Seq data
• Previous experience with molecular biology techniques (gene silencing, RT-qPCR, western blot)

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