Senior Researcher - Center for Modeling Pediatric Disease

St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital is recognized one of the Best Places to Work by Glassdoor and People magazine’s 50 Companies That Care. Our mission is to advance cures, and means of prevention, for pediatric catastrophic diseases through research and treatment. We look for the best people to join our teams and provide world-class facilities, state-of-the-art technologies, and extraordinary support to ensure scientific progress to support our mission. The Center for Modeling Pediatric Diseases (CMPD) plays a key role in providing that support. As a new initiative at St Jude Children’s Research Hospital (SJCRH), its mission is to serve the research community by delivering high-quality, fully characterized, patient-derived, pluripotent cells.

Our aim is to generate these cells on our fully automated, state-of-the-art, robotic system. Our methodologies are based on the Nobel Prize-winning work of Shinya Yamanaka, which culminated in the ability to create induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from terminally differentiated human somatic cells. These iPSCs permit the derivation of both normal and disease phenotype, patient-matched cell lines, and are, therefore, key to developing personalized medicine approaches. iPSCs provide a vital tool to study the cellular and molecular mechanisms involved in patient-specific responses to treatments and in the future will form the basis of creating patient-derived, patient-matched cellular therapeutics. Since iPSCs are derived from somatic cells, they can be created without harvesting vital stem cell pools in the body. For example, CMPD is able to generate iPSCs from blood and urine, which are collected as part of routine clinical monitoring. We therefore circumvent the ethical issues encountered by working with stem cells
from donated oocytes or embryonic stem cells.

As CMPD establishes our methodologies and implements our automation we seek an exceptional and motivated individual who will be able to execute standard operating procedures accurately and efficiently. The transition from manual to automated requires a highly organized, methodical, and algorithmic mindset. This role provides an exceptional opportunity to learn automation programming
routines. Ability to demonstrate attention to detail is key, as is a desire to work in a highly reproducible manner, by close adherence to optimized SOPs. However, an ability to innovate, and determine where evolutions can be made to improve time and cost efficiencies, in coordination with the team, is also highly desirable. There are opportunities to learn bioinformatics and data analysis skills, including running machine learning pipelines to evaluate microscope images of developing iPSC colonies. Our automation system includes the latest model instruments: Hamilton Vantage; Hamilton LabElite; Cytation 5; Cytomat (500 capacity); KingFisher Presto; BioStore III.

If you are excited about using state-of-the-art instrumentation and if you are able to take a one-off research experiment and optimize it to make it unbreakably reproducible, and would like to do for biology what Henry T Ford did for car manufacturing, then we would like to hear from you!

The successful candidate will assist the CMPD Director to:

• Develop daily implementation of advanced cell culture techniques, including reprogramming/biobanking protocols, and the ability to undertake sophisticated characterization assays.
• Follows SOPs necessary to automate various manual stem cell workflows such as splitting of stem cells, the purification of specific populations, freezing cells, setting up and analyzing various quality control and characterization assays.
• Assists with the cryopreservation of bar-coded samples using an automated liquid N2 system.
• Manages specific, but limited, laboratory functions such as inventory management, ordering, instrument maintenance etc.
• Demonstrates effort to increase knowledge in relevant areas of research and participates in the presentation and publication of research results, if necessary.
• Conducts scientific projects and maintains efficient laboratory operations with minimal supervision.
• Data entry into various databases
• Assists with stem