CSIRO Postdoctoral Fellowship in Infectious Animal Diseases

• Do you have a PhD in immunology, virology, cell biology, bioinformatics, molecular biology, veterinary immunology or a related field?
• Want to contribute to research in the prevention, detection and response to exotic disease threats?
• Join CSIRO – Australia’s leading scientific research organisation!

CSIRO Early Research Career (CERC) Postdoctoral Fellowships provide opportunities to scientists and engineers who have completed their doctorate and have less than three years of relevant postdoctoral work experience. These fellowships aim to develop the next generation of future leaders of the innovation system.

Lumpy skin disease (LSD) is a vector-borne disease of cattle. It is one of the most economically important viral diseases of cattle due to its impacts on animal health, production and trade. It is now present in South-East Asia, and the CERC fellow will support key preparedness activities, develop our research portfolio and contribute to enhanced response capability should an incursion occur.

This role is part of a “Team Sport” CERC Fellowship where two CERC Fellows work with multiple teams collaborating on an overarching, multi-disciplinary research project to characterise lumpy skin disease virus (LSDV) infection. Each CERC Fellow will lead an individual sub-project, contributing their expertise, and working closely with the other team members will aim to deliver significant scientific and translational impact on a broad research topic. 

An opportunity exists for an innovative and creative early career researcher to join a team of CERC postdoctoral fellows and scientists who will collectively investigate the host-immune responses to LSDV. Working closely with other team members, this CERC fellow will develop novel ‘immunomics’ capabilities and significantly strengthen Australia’s biosecurity preparedness for an exotic animal disease by blending multiple facets of immunological research with computational skills in bioinformatics.

This foundational research will aid in developing novel vaccine platforms by understanding the immune response to infection. The CERC Fellow will correlate single-cell transcriptomic signatures with disease outcomes and functional immunity, such as neutralising antibody responses to optimise vaccine antigens, delivery modalities and prime-boost schedules. Novel sequencing techniques such as Ribo-seq will enable a more detailed understanding of viral immune evasion strategies for better vaccines and resilience technologies. In this way, the big data generated will enable translational outputs.