Ph.D position: Complex Causality in Aging

The Institute

The Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) is an international biomedical research institute of excellence, based in Barcelona, Spain, with more than 400 scientists from 44 countries. The CRG is composed by an interdisciplinary, motivated and creative scientific team which is supported both by a flexible and efficient administration and by high-end and innovative technologies.

In April 2021, the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) received the renewal of the 'HR Excellence in Research ' Award from the European Commission. This is a recognition of the Institute's commitment to developing an HR Strategy for Researchers, designed to bring the practices and procedures in line with the principles of the European Charter for Researchers and the Code of Conduct for the Recruitment of Researchers (Charter and Code).

Please, check out our Recruitment Policy

The role

The molecular mechanisms driving aging are embedded in complex physiologic networks. At long time-scales, these mechanisms exhibit emergent, collective behaviour that is both a fascinating topic and a fundamental barrier for traditional experimental approaches to establish molecular-level causality. To understand biological aging and develop effective therapies against it, we need better and more quantitative approaches that can rapidly characterize the multiple, complex causal pathways through which molecular-level changes determine systems-level dynamics.

The Dynamics of Living Systems group is an interdisciplinary team that pursues these goals through a mix of molecular genetics, synthetic biology, high-throughput imaging, machine learning, modelling, and math.

We are currently looking for two candidate profiles:

• Students interested in wet-lab experiments, with a masters degree in genetics, genomics, biomedical engineering, or molecular biology

And/or

• Students interested in computational work, with a masters in engineering statistics, physics, computer science or bioinformatics

The group is led by Nicholas Stroustrup, Ph.D Systems Biology, B.S.E Electrical Engineering. For more information, check out our research website: http://lifespanmachine.crg.eu .

The successful candidate will:

• Collaborate on the development of novel experimental and computational methods to study the genetics and molecular physiology of aging.
• Develop new functional genomics approaches for measuring change at the single cell, individual, and population level.
• Work with C. elegans as a fast-aging and genetically tractable model for prototyping approaches that can be transferred to vertebrate models and humans.
• Engage in close wet-lab / dry-lab collaborations to develop new experimental methods
• Join in regular journal clubs, departmental data clubs, and institutional symposia
• Work with the lab’s high-throughput imaging technology “The Lifespan Machine”.
• Interact with colleagues the CNAG (centro nacional de análisis genómico) Single Cell Genomics Team and CRG Genomics Core, as well as colleagues located in biology, physics, and engineering departments at multiple institutes and universities across Barcelona.

About the team

We are a small, international team that combines expertise in genetics, molecular biology, physics, computational biology, and engineering. We are based in the EMBL/CRG Systems Biology Unit in Barcelona, Spain, which is an unusually great place to live and do science. We build and apply new technologies that allow us to collect the data needed to build quantitatively rigorous models of physiology.