CSIRO Postdoctoral Fellowship in Pathogen Effector Biology

• Do you have a PhD in plant molecular biology, plant-microbe interactions, or synthetic biology?
• Interested in developing technology for screening pathogen genes for virulence roles?
• Join CSIRO's Agriculture and Food team for this exciting 3-year postdoctoral opportunity

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.

The CERC Fellow will be working across two high-performing groups (Pests & Diseases, Synthetic Traits) at CSIRO Agriculture & Food, engaging with a new initiative within CSIRO named Catalysing Australia’s Biosecurity, Data61 and the Collaborative Intelligence Future Science Platform for genome annotation. The CERC fellow will be housed at the Pests & Diseases group which is globally recognised for delivering impact and advancing knowledge on rust disease resistance with the overall goal to prevent crop losses. 

To facilitate infection many plant pathogens secrete effector proteins that if recognised by the host trigger plant immunity responses. Until recently the identification of effectors has been a challenge; however, our team recently developed a breakthrough screening platform for pooled effector library screening in plant protoplasts to isolate host-recognised effectors from wheat stem rust. The CERC Fellow will take this platform to maturity and demonstrate its applicability to other important diseases and unexplored questions such as leveraging the platform for rapid discovery of genes are not only disease-causing, but also disease-preventing in a plant-pathogen agnostic manner. The CERC Fellow will benefit from working in a world leading team and through exposure to a broad scientific context spanning the spectrum from basic biology to applied delivery of science research to achieve industry outcomes.