Title:                   Senior / Research Associate, Microbiology 

Location:           Cambridge, MA

Reports to:        Staff Scientist II

The Role:

We are looking for a microbiologist to design and execute microbial ecology experiments to accelerate the development of live bacterial consortia as drugs. The candidate will advance applied microbial ecology research within Vedanta and support production of live biotherapeutic products (LBPs) for multiple pre-clinical programs. We are looking for an individual who is detail-oriented, communicative, and excited to tackle scientific and technical challenges in a team-oriented environment.

Here’s What You’ll Do:

• Work with diverse gut bacterial strains from our isolate collection
• Design and execute microbial ecology experiments involving co-cultures of gut bacteria
• Execute protocols on liquid handling robots to conduct bacterial growth experiments
• Generate pre-clinical LBPs containing mixtures of monocultured bacterial strains.
• Manage freezer stocks for diverse gut bacterial strains and samples produced in growth experiments using a laboratory information management system (LIMS).
• Organize and document protocols for generating and using pre-clinical LBPs using an electronic laboratory notebook (ELN).
• Contribute to the planning of new laboratory robotics protocols for bacterial growth experiments.
• Prepare bacterial culture samples for DNA extraction, PCR, and/or sequencing by our Molecular Biology team.
• You will work as part of an in vitro microbial ecology team and be responsible for communicating and coordinating tasks within the team and with our systems biology, immunology, and infectious disease teams
• You will report directly to an experienced microbiologist and have additional mentors available for computational training.

Requirements:

• BSc or MS in the life sciences (or engineering with experience relevant to the life sciences)
• 2-5+ years of experience in microbiology (inclusive of formal education)
• Expertise with standard microbiological assays, experimental design, and aseptic technique is required
• Experience in anaerobic microbiology is strongly preferred
• Exposure to some computer programming (inclusive of self-learning) is preferred

Why join Vedanta Biosciences

Vedanta is pioneering the development of a new class of therapies that act by modulating the human microbiome. Modulation of the human microbiota holds enormous promise to treat a broad range of immune and infectious diseases in ways that are completely different to existing drug classes. Breakthrough discoveries of our scientific team in the field of mucosal immunology have led to the first rationally designed drug candidates in the microbiome field. Vedanta was founded by PureTech Health and a team of world-renowned experts in immunology and microbiology. 

We invite you to explore our site to learn more about our company and how our discovery platform enables identification of bacterial consortia with drug-like properties and their manufacture to GMP standards.

APPLY HERE