Phd Position in Computational Biology

The Department of Biomedicine is a joint effort between the University of Basel and the University Hospitals Basel. It unites basic and clinical scientists to advance our understanding of health and disease and to develop pioneering therapies benefiting the lives of patients in areas of unmet need. With more than 70 research groups and 900 employees, the Department of Biomedicine is the largest department at the University. We are located in the heart of Basel at 6 different locations. Be part of our future

The mission of the group is to understand fundamental mechanisms regulating short
- and long-term metabolic adaptation to genetic and chemical perturbations to find new and unconventional therapeutic strategies, ranging from antibacterial to anticancer drugs. To this end, we develop new ways to combine state-of-the-art technologies in metabolomics with mathematical modeling.

**Your position**
- Developing new strategies to combine high-throughput metabolomics with single cell analysis of metabolic and transcriptional reporters
- Investigating if variations in metabolic activity can act as metabolic mediators of antibiotic tolerance
- Determining the underlying mechanisms that link regulation of respiro-/fermentative metabolism to phenotypic heterogeneity and antibiotic tolerance.
- Testing the relevance of metabolic tolerance in clinical strains
- Support and preparation of scientific reports and journal articles

**Your profile**

Essential:

- Master's degree in (Bio)Physics, (Bio)engineering, Biological Sciences, Microbiology, Biochemistry, Systems Biology, Molecular Biology, Bioinformatics/Computational Biology, or related fields.
- Basic experience of designing and running experiments with microbial cultures in the laboratory
- Hands-on experience with key biochemical and molecular biological methods
- Motivation to work in an international research environment
- Experience with and/or motivation to learn systems biology approaches, high-throughput methodologies, analysis of single cells imaging data
- Experience with and motivation to learn programming language (e.g. Matlab, R or Python)
- Good communication skills

Any of the following will be a plus:

- Proficiency in data analysis using Matlab, R or Python
- Interest in mathematical modeling of metabolic and regulatory/signaling network

**We offer you**
- You will have access to state-of-the-art research equipment in metabolomics, cell biology, time-lapse microscopy and single cell analysis.
- You will work in a dynamic and highly interdisciplinary team including computer scientists, experimentalists and clinicians.
- You will be involved in cross-disciplinary collaborations and have training opportunities to further develop and grow your scientific interests.
- Access to a large consortium of experts in different disciplines, such chemistry, engineering, clinics, computational biology and (Micro
- / Cell
- Opportunity to work in close contact with other basic
- and clinical-research groups at the Department of Biomedicine and the Biozentrum in Basel
- Support from highly competent, experienced team members and potential to lead projects with a high degree of academic freedom

Key References:
Anglada-Girotto, M., Handschin, G., Ortmayr, K. et al. Combining CRISPRi and metabolomics for functional annotation of compound libraries. Nat Chem Biol 18, 482-491 (2022).
Fuentes, D.A.F., Manfredi, P., Jenal, U. et al. Pareto optimality between growth-rate and lag-time couples metabolic noise to phenotypic heterogeneity in Escherichia coli. Nat Commun 12, 3204 (2021).
Øyås O., Borrell S., Trauner A., et al. Model-based integration of genomics and metabolomics reveals SNP functionality in Mycobacterium tuberculosis. PNAS 117 (2020)
Campos A. and Zampieri M. Metabolomics-Driven Exploration of the Chemical Drug Space to Predict Combination Antimicrobial Therapies. Molecular Cell 74, 1291-1303 (2020)

**Application / Contact**

Please use

- Describe your general scientific interests. What are the scientific questions that you are most passionate about?
- Please give the title and a short description of any research project carried out during your studies (diploma thesis, honours project, MSc thesis, etc.). State the rationale and goals of the research, and indicate your own contributions to the results. List publications, if any:

- Describe your interest in my group. What sparked your interest in our research? What projects would you be interested in pursuing within the lab? For which our publications would you like to be a contributing/first author and why? What do you think can be your own contribution to the lab?

Apply