Research Associate (Cardiff)

Dementia is the biggest health challenge of our century.

To date there is no way to prevent it or even slow its progression, and there is an urgent need to fill the knowledge gap in our basic understanding of the diseases that cause it.

The UK Dementia Research Institute (UK DRI) is the biggest UK initiative driving forward research to fill this gap.

Rapid advances in DNA technologies and computational biology are enabling scientists to identify more and more of the subtle DNA variations that can influence a person’s risk of developing different neurodegenerative diseases. Researchers at the UK DRI at Cardiff interrogate the host of genetic variations linked with neurodegenerative diseases to make new discoveries about disease processes. They use experimental model systems along with a variety of cutting-edge experimental methods and equipment to dissect the biology of many of these genes. Building on the team’s international reputation for complex data analyses, they develop and apply advanced computational approaches that enable them to make sense of huge datasets generated by complex experiments.

The UK Dementia Research Institute (DRI) at Cardiff are looking to appoint a Research Associate. The position will be in the group of Prof Philip Taylor, UK DRI at Cardiff.

The post is funded by the UK DRI and is a collaborative project between the Cardiff and Edinburgh UK DRI centres and Oxford University. The successful candidate will join a well-funded group and use cell biology, single cell RNA sequencing and informatics to characterise iPSC-derived microglia-like cells. Using state-of-the-art single cell sequence analysis and informatic approaches to establish a framework for the use human iPSC-derived microglial cultures in translational platforms. The project will be aligned to the UK DRI at Cardiff’s flagship IPSC Platform to Model Alzheimer’s Disease Risk (IPMAR), which will establish a panel of iPSC from people with high and low polygenic risk for Alzheimer’s disease. This project will establish the criteria by which iPSC microglia are evaluated for use within the research community.