Department of Zoology

Applications are invited for a Postdoctoral Research Associate to join the Social Fluids Laboratory (https://leboeuflab.com) led by Dr Adria LeBoeuf in the Department of Zoology (https://www.bio.cam.ac.uk/staff/adria-leboeuf).

This position is part of a BBSRC-funded project on metabolic cooperation between bodies, investigating autophagy-mediated resource transfer in social insects. The project focuses on how organisms mobilise and package their own resources for transfer to others. Ants are a wonderful model clade with deeply intertwined social relationships between colony members underpinned by variable amounts of physical transfer of endogenously produced resources across species, making a clear parallel between the tissues or cells of a multicellular organism.

The successful candidate will combine molecular biology with functional validation in naturally evolved systems. You will develop and optimise CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing techniques, perform RNAi experiments, analyse multi-omic datasets (transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics), and conduct behavioural and physiological experiments.

We seek a new team member who identifies as a molecular biologist/insect physiologist who is excited by weird biology and not afraid to get their hands dirty, both in the field, collecting ants in Madagascar, and at the bench, troubleshooting protocols in non-model organisms. Experience with CRISPR and RNAi in insects is essential. While primarily a wet-lab position, you should be comfortable with some bioinformatics analyses and data science of omics data.

https://www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/postdoctoral-research-associate-fixed-term-pf48443