Research Associate

Work Your Magic with us

Ready to explore, break barriers, and discover more? We know you've got big plans - so do we Our colleagues across the globe love innovating with science and technology to enrich people's lives with our solutions in Healthcare, Life Science, and Electronics. Together, we dream big and are passionate about caring for our rich mix of people, customers, patients, and planet. That's why we are always looking for curious minds that see themselves imagining the unimaginable with us.

United As One for Patients, our purpose in Healthcare is to help create, improve and prolong lives. We develop medicines, intelligent devices and innovative technologies in therapeutic areas such as Oncology, Neurology and Fertility. Our teams work together across 6 continents with passion and relentless curiosity in order to help patients at every stage of life. Joining our Healthcare team is becoming part of a diverse, inclusive and flexible working culture, presenting great opportunities for personal development and career advancement across the globe.

The Biotech Development Center (BDC) is Merck's flagship biotech investment, in line with the ambition to be the Vibrant Science and Technology Company. The BDC has cutting-edge technologies of the future with high-tech automated and digital laboratories, allowing different development functions to work together in a flexible, agile and collaborative environment. Within the Global Drug Product Development function in BDC, we are looking for a highly motivated research associate with a strong analytical background of biologic formulations. She or he will work together with formulation and analytical experts on formulation and process development for biological drugs.

**Your role**:
Reporting to the Early-phase Drug Product Development Head in the Global Drug Product Development organization, you have the opportunity to significantly contribute to the start-up of high-tech CMC development laboratories in the BDC and help shape the future of biotech drug product development.

Depending on your prior background and seniority, you will also guide implementation of analytical methods from a laboratory scale to an automation/robotic scale, working in close collaboration with our automation and formulation development scientists.

**Your key responsibilities in this role are**:

- Contribute to the startup and rollout of high-tech formulation development laboratories in the BDC, by:

- Collaborating with digital team and robotic / automation scientists to help setting up formulation development workflows on an end-to-end robotic system;
- Interacting with team lead, department head and development/analytical scientists for setting up our future formulation development activities;
- Performing analytical technologies integration into the robotic platform for subsequent analyses.
- Support our digital sub-team to integrate our analytical needs into the digital environment of the BDC (e.g. writing of analytical recipes/tasks and data analysis)

**Once the BDC is fully operational**:

- Execution of analytical activities, mostly in the field of electrophoresis, mass spectrometry and liquid chromatography
- Scouting for novel analytical approaches for predictive and/or High Throughput Screening of biotech formulations;
- Interact with automation and robotic experts for executing formulation activities on the robotic platform, as well as for standard formulation development and analytics in the lab;
- Accountable for the quality of own work with a low level of guidance and direction in a complex situation. Actively seeks, shares and re-applies knowledge in own field of activities.

**Who you are**:

- MSc or PhD Graduate degree in Chemistry, Pharmacy, Biology, Biotechnology or related field
- Strong experience with analytical tools applied to biotech product testing and characterization, including, but not limited to electrophoresis and mass spectrometry. Chromatography, compendial methods, spectroscopy, calorimetry and particle characterization are a strong plus.
- Experience in formulation development and/or characterization of biologics or other protein samples, across early and late phase, ideally in an industry setting
- Basic to advanced experience in automation and/or High Throughput Screening approaches and Data Quality principles, Quality by Design (e.g., DoE) is a plus
- Preferred hands-on experience with laboratory information systems, digital tools and lean principles
- Proactive mindset for identifying new tools & technologies, new improvement opportunities and anticipating future challenges
- Excellent in writing, interpersonal communication, and presentation in English; French is an asset

**What we offer**:We are curious minds that come from a broad range of backgrounds, perspectives, and life experiences. We celebrate all dimensions of diversity and believe that it drives excellence and innovation, strengthening our ability to lead in science and tech