PhD Student Position (Enzymology and enzyme engineering)
University of ZurichInstitut für Chemie, University of Zurich, Winterthurerstrasse, Zürich, SwitzerlandActive
Job description
The successful candidate will take on responsibilities that approximately follow the trajectory below.
Although no candidate will be expected to have experience in all the fields above prior to joining, the project is interdisciplinary. Thus, an enthusiasm and capacity to become proficient in all of these techniques is essential.
Additionally, the student will be responsible for academic and organizational duties, including
- Cloning, expression, purification, and activity characterization for our target enzyme,
- Chemical synthesis of substrates and assay probes,
- Assay development for screening enzymatic activity,
- Creation and high-throughput screening of DNA libraries,
- NGS and computational analysis of variants,
- Scripting in python for data analysis,
- Characterization of key enzyme variants, and
- Combining mechanistic enzymology and computation to understand the effects of mutations on catalysis.
Although no candidate will be expected to have experience in all the fields above prior to joining, the project is interdisciplinary. Thus, an enthusiasm and capacity to become proficient in all of these techniques is essential.
Additionally, the student will be responsible for academic and organizational duties, including
- serving as a teaching assistant for introductory chemistry courses,
- participating in group meetings and departmental seminars,
- fulfilling group responsibilities (equipment and organizational responsibilities), and
- completing PhD requirements for the chemistry graduate school program.