Contract, Research Associate - R&D

Senior Research Associate – Research Associate/Senior Research Associate at BrainChild Bio will join our Research and Development team, discovering and developing life-saving medicines to treat brain tumors in children and adults. This role executes high quality functional assays, mechanistic studies, and development experiments, and reports data across a wide variety of inquiries to further our understanding of the safety and efficacy of our pipeline candidates. RA/SRAs are experienced in a variety of laboratory techniques and are able to quickly train into those which they find they need. Interpretation of data will be mostly independent from senior lab staff and reports of data should include concepts on how to build on the data with future experiments. Success in this position is defined by highly organized, excellent quality, on-time delivery of experimental results, with clear, concise reporting of results both in written record and in presentation to colleagues.
Qualifications: Bachelor’s degree in cell biology, molecular biology, immunology, bioengineering, chemical engineering, or related field, plus 0-4 years of relevant laboratory experience in an industrial setting. Years of experience and type of experience will determine eligibility for SRA vs. RA.

Key responsibilities:

• Laboratory Experimentation: Perform high-quality, meticulous bench work in a wide variety of contexts, including cell-based and molecular assays. Design basic experiments independently and provide meaningful input to more complex scientific problems.
• Data Analysis and Reporting: Perform standard analysis and interpretation of data generated from your own work and that of others. Generate figures and slides to describe the outcome of experiments to colleagues. Propose logical next steps with data-driven justification for how the team should proceed.
• Timely Documentation: Maintain an up-to-date ELN record, ensuring that current and future colleagues can quickly gain a clear understanding of your experimental design, its assumptions, and its outcomes. Store and catalog data with consistent adherence to laboratory guidelines. Log reagent characteristics to facilitate downstream usage.
• Participation in Lab Maintenance: Work collaboratively with your colleagues and operations staff to ensure basic laboratory maintenance tasks are completed to ensure smooth and efficient operation of the lab space.
• Adapt to Lab Needs: Put forth effort to engage in cross-disciplinary training and step in to support teams experiencing unusually high workload as necessary.
• Train and support junior colleagues: Identify and engage in opportunities to train junior colleagues on new techniques. Support the work of others in the lab by cross-training and willingly assisting colleagues where possible.

Key behaviors and skills:

• Meticulous organization:Maintain highly organized and understandable notes for assigned experiments. Conduct experiments in an organized manner, ensuring all data is collected and stored in accordance with lab policy. Adhere closely to production protocols for bioproduction core productions. 
• Collaboration:Work closely with a variety of groups and individuals to ensure that the team’s effort is optimally applied to achieving our goals. Become comfortable with discomfort and be open to learning new techniques and growing your skillset. 
• Drive to Learn and Grow:Expand your expertise in CAR-T by learning from your senior colleagues as well as self-teaching and proactively pursuing answers to your own knowledge gaps. Accept failure and learn from it. Strengthen the team by supporting the growth of your junior colleagues. 

Key deliverables:

• High quality execution and reporting of scientific results and production runs 
• Clear, concise documentation and storage of experimental data 
• Personal and professional growth as a scientist

Technical Skill Set:

• Lab Scale Viral Vector Production
• Lab or Clinical Scale Car-T Production
• Flow Cytometry
• Droplet Digital PCR
• Cell-Based Assays