Associate Scientist

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 the BDC, we are looking for a highly motivated associate scientist with a strong background in proteins and formulations of biologics. She or he will work together with other scientists within the team, as well as analytical scientists, throughout all steps of drug product development.

**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 and roll-out of high-tech CMC development laboratories in the BDC and help shape the future of biotech drug product development.

You will collaborate with scientists, robotic & automation experts and analysts and support execution of drug product development studies, mostly in early stages of CMC development. These will include formulation development, process development, stability studies and (pre)clinical administration simulation. Additionally, you will support our R&D colleagues in selecting the best and most promising molecules in order to re-risk CMC development.

You will ensure that all formulation development studies are successfully carried out on our high-tech end-to-end robotic platform.

While analytics will mostly be performed by our analytical team, you will still have the chance to perform characterization analytics, such as DSF, DLS and other types of spectroscopic or stability measurements.

**Your key responsibilities in this role are**:
Contribute to the final phases of BDC roll-out 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;
- Support our digital sub-team to integrate our laboratory instruments and robotic platform into the digital environment of the BDC

Once the BDC is fully operational:

- Design and execution of formulation and process development studies
- 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
- In-depth understanding of proteins and factors affecting their physical and chemical stability
- 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 exp