Postdoctoral Fellow - Hill Lab

Short summary

The Developmental Signalling Laboratory headed by Caroline Hill focuses on cell signalling in early vertebrate development and disease - see https://www.crick.ac.uk/research/a-z-researchers/researchers-d-j/caroline-hill/ . Our work seeks to understand how TGF-β family signalling pathways function normally in early vertebrate development and in adult untransformed cells, and how these signalling pathways are perturbed in disease, in particular in cancer and the Marfan-related syndromes. Work in the Hill laboratory exploits the very powerful combination of early vertebrate developmental systems (zebrafish embryos), together with a variety of model tissue culture systems (human and mouse ES cell/iPS cell models), and mouse cancer models and uses a very wide range of methodologies including developmental and cell biology, cancer biology, next generation sequencing and computational modelling. The Hill lab encourages creative and independent thinking  and promotes excellent training and mentoring. The group currently comprises nine people – four postdocs, two PhD students, a clinical fellow, a masters student and a senior laboratory research scientist.

Key Responsibilities

One of the projects will focus on how the embryo generates the correct numbers of endoderm progenitors, even though their initial specification results from a stochastic process. We have shown that a correction mechanism exists during gastrulation and segmentation that buffers the numbers of endoderm progenitors. We want to understand how numbers of endoderm progenitors are sensed and how the numbers of progenitors are adjusted – deciphering the mechanisms involved. The second project will focus on how the endoderm and mesodermal lineages transcriptionally and physically separate during gastrulation and will make use of multi-omics scRNA-seq/scATAC-seq and novel lineage tracing approaches.

Postdoctoral Fellows at the Crick lead their own projects, contribute to other projects on a collaborative basis and may guide PhD students in their research

About us

The Francis Crick Institute is a biomedical discovery institute dedicated to understanding the fundamental biology underlying health and disease. Its work is helping to understand why disease develops and to translate discoveries into new ways to prevent, diagnose and treat illnesses such as cancer, heart disease, stroke, infections, and neurodegenerative diseases.

An independent organisation, its founding partners are the Medical Research Council (MRC), Cancer Research UK, Wellcome, UCL (University College London), Imperial College London and King’s College London.

The Crick was formed in 2015, and in 2016 it moved into a new state-of-the-art building in central London which brings together 1500 scientists and support staff working collaboratively across disciplines, making it the biggest biomedical research facility under in one building in Europe.

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