Position title: CSIRO Postdoctoral Fellowship in Anti-viral Immuno-engineering Bioinformatics

Employer: CSIRO

Closing date: 11 August

Brief position description: CERC Fellows are appointed for three years or full time equivalent. 
The CERC Fellow will play a critical role in an overarching project which involves a multi-disciplinary, multi-CERC Fellow team to develop and validate a novel solution to address viral outbreaks in livestock and aquaculture species, leveraging new developments in the field of gene editing. The overarching project brings together a multi-disciplinary team to address this challenge which cost the agricultural industry millions of dollars every year. Harnessing the collective expertise across the fields of immunology, genome engineering and bioinformatics, the multi-CERC Fellow team will draw on the SynBio principle of “Design-Build-Test-Learn” to adapt and optimize a key antiviral mechanism from bacteria. The adapted antiviral platform can then be transplanted into agricultural species to enhance resilience to viral pathogens.
The CERC Fellow will develop models of viral evolution and use this to inform the design of CRISPR/Cas13 based antivirals for applications in livestock and aquaculture industries. Specifically, they will use machine learning to approaches to understand how viruses evolve in response to selection pressure to better understanding escape pathways and use this to design CRISPR/Cas13 anti-viral that are robust to escape mutations. The Fellow will work closely with multidisciplinary experts in aquaculture, livestock, virology and genome engineering to achieve project outcomes. The project also aligns to the Immune Resilience Future Science Platform (FSP) which aims to harness the fundamental understanding of the immune system to develop novel strategies and platforms that will build resilience in animals to combat disease and parasite challenges.
This role is part of a “Team Sport” CERC Fellowship where three CERC Fellows work with multiple teams collaborating on an overarching, multi-disciplinary research project. Each CERC Fellow will lead an individual sub-project, contributing their expertise, and work closely with the other team members with the aim of delivering significant scientific and translational impact on a broad research topic.

Job website: http://jobs.csiro.au/job-invite/93532/

Contact name: Laurence Wilson

Contact email: laurence.wilson@csiro.au