Posted 12/13/2023
My group at Harvard has 2 funded postdoctoral positions to research the underlying biochemical mechanisms and physical forces driving bacterial cell division and growth, and how they relate to antimicrobial resistance.
Both positions are funded by the Wellcome Trust as part of a major Discovery Award and will be part of an international collaboration with the groups of Simon Foster, Jamie Hobbs, Jeffrey Green, Rebecca Corrigan (all in Sheffield), and Rosalind Allen (in Jena).
Working in both S. aureus and B. subtilis, our contribution to this consortium is advanced imaging approaches to understand how the dynamic spatial activity of individual molecules of different proteins collectively create the fine-scale architecture of the cell wall and, moreover, how these effects exert the required forces for growth and division. (we have some new exciting tools to measure membrane tension in vivo).
Our group is multidisciplinary, and we welcome candidates from a wide array of fields (biophysics, cell biology, microbiology, etc), but prefer candidates with coding experience (in any language).
These positions pay 20% above the NIH minimum (67,781 to start) to accommodate cost of living expenses in the Boston area.
If interested, email your CV and a brief introduction to egarner@g.harvard.edu
The overall summary of the Wellcome Discovery Grant:
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) threatens human healthcare. These posts will be part of a large international team that will integrate microbial physiology, biochemistry, and genetics with biophysics, mathematical modeling, and world-leading imaging capabilities to gain a transformative understanding of the important human pathogen Staphylococcus aureus. We will focus on Methicillin Resistant S. aureus (MRSA), building on our foundation of recent discoveries. Our key goals are: to determine the molecular and biophysical basis for high-level resistance in MRSA; to unravel the mechanisms underpinning bacterial cell wall homeostasis during growth and division; and to understand the coordination of cell wall dynamics with cellular physiology, providing a route to novel therapies.
