Research Associate in Precision Manufacturing of Large-Area Nanoporous Packaging for Stable Vaccines (Nanopackaging)

Contract: Full-Time, Fixed Term appointment for 18 months

Campus: White City and South Kensington

Applications are invited for a Research Associate position to join the Department of Materials. The overarching goal is to develop a versatile nanoporous packaging (nanopackaging) that can allow vaccines to be stable under ambient conditions.

Many vaccines, such as RNA-based vaccines used to treat COVID-19, have extremely limited stability and require storage under cold or cryogenic conditions. This results in the need for cold/frozen chains in vaccine deployment, which is not only expensive, but is notably absent in lowand middle-income nations. To obviate the need for cold-chains, we propose to use confinement effects to allow vaccines to be stable at near-ambient temperatures. This will involve a combination of: 1) vaccine encapsulation and delivery using multifunctional liposomes, and 2) vaccine storage in specifically tailored nanopackaging. This project is funded through the prestigious Imperial President’s Excellence Fund for Frontier Research, and brings together a team from Materials (Dr. Hoye and Dr. Petrov) and Chemical Engineering (Dr. Rongjun Chen and Prof. Jerry Heng).

The post-holder will be a conscientious and innovative scientist with a PhD (or equivalent) in materials science, chemistry, physics or engineering. You will have a strong background in nanofabrication and thin film growth. Addition, the post-holder will be experienced in nanocharacterisation, including electron microscopy, photoemission spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction.

You will work within a team of dynamic students and postdocs in the groups of Dr. Hoye and Dr. Petrov.

Excellent communication and organisational skills are essential.

**Candidates who have not yet been officially awarded their PhD will be appointed as Research Assistant within the salary range £36,694- £39,888 per annum.

Closing date: 29th September 2021

For additional information please contact: Dr. Robert Hoye, [email protected]  or Dr. Peter Petrov ([email protected] )

Further guidance may be sought from Mrs Darakshan Khan ([email protected] ).

For technical issues when applying online please email. [email protected]  

Please apply via our website searching for job number ENG01852https://www.imperial.ac.uk/jobs/  

The College is a proud signatory to the San-Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), which means that in hiring and promotion decisions, we evaluate applicants on the quality of their work, not the journal impact factor where it is published. For more information, see https://www.imperial.ac.uk/researchand-innovation/about-imperial-research/research-evaluation/  

The College believes that the use of animals in research is vital to improve human and animal health and welfare. Animals may only be used in research programmes where their use is shown to be necessary for developing new treatments and making medical advances. Imperial is committed to ensuring that, in cases where this research is deemed essential, all animals in the College’s care are treated with full respect, and that all staff involved with this work show due consideration at every level.

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/research-and-innovation/about-imperial-research/research-integrity/animalresearch/  

We are committed to equality of opportunity, to eliminating discrimination and to creating an inclusive working environment for all. We therefore encourage candidates to apply irrespective of age, disability, marriage or civil partnership status, pregnancy or maternity, race, religion and belief, gender identity, sex, or sexual orientation. We are an Athena SWAN Silver Award winner, a Disability Confident Leader and a Stonewall Diversity Champion.