Job Description
Our mission at Asimov is to advance humanity's ability to design living systems, enabling biotechnologies with outsized benefit to society. We're developing a mammalian synthetic biology platformfrom cells to softwareto enable the design and manufacture of next-generation therapeutics.
Calling all Research Associates looking for a unique opportunity to be part of a nimble forward-thinking synthetic biology startup. The Priority Cloning team (part of our DNA amp; Strain Construction (DNASC)) group is looking for a Research Associate/Associate Scientist to help us build the foundation for engineering biology. You’ll report to Stephen Von Stetina and work closely with synthetic biologists using the latest molecular biology and automation techniques to help advance our DNA and strain construction pipeline in our new, state-of-the-art lab and office space in the heart of Boston’s Fenway area.
About the role:
- You’ll support the Priority Cloning team by driving various modern molecular biology projects (from DNA assembly design, to prep delivery) using manual workflows as well as our state-of-the-art automation. - You’ll identify bottlenecks in our process and work with our DNASC scientists to increase efficiency. - You’ll document new internal and external samples in LIMS, adhering to standard sample management processes. - Working as part of a multifunctional team, you’ll partner with synthetic biologists on the DNASC team as well as members of the Cell Line Development, Synthetic Biology and Software Development teams. - Supporting our operational timeline and efficiency goals, you will help to optimize cloning protocols.- You’ll support plasmid construction in order to supply plasmid DNA reagents with accelerated speed to support both internal and external collaboration projects.- Automation experience is a plus but a desire to learn to develop automation of lab experiments is a must.- Experience in using scripting tools (e.g., Python, Matlab, or R) to analyze results are a plus, and experience in protein library design and preparation for high throughput screening is a major plus as well.
About you:
- You value teamwork and are motivated to contribute to the team’s goals. - Working as part of a highly integrated research team is exciting to you.-You have experience, outside of coursework, with modern molecular biology and/or microbiological techniques such as various DNA assembly methods (Golden Gate, Gibson), PCR, colony picking, and DNA preps.- Being detail-oriented isn’t just a sound bite for you, it’s part of your DNA. - Keeping track of a bunch of moving parts is easy for you because you’re highly organized.- Deep bench experience is necessary to be successful in this role, and you will have at least 3+ years of research experience after college/university.- Experience with optimizing cloning protocols (PCR, Gibson, and especially Golden Gate) and basic mammalian cell culture techniques a plus- You have a B.S. or M.S. degree in biology, biochemistry, biological engineering, or a related field.- Experience extracting data using scripts from large databases or desire to learn is a plus.- We’re big on tools here! We’re happy to train you but if you know your way around Benchling, LIMS, Google Drive, and Excel, it’ll help you come up to speed quickly.We're fueled by a vision to transform biological engineering into a fully-fledged engineering discipline. Should you join our team, you will grow with a constantly evolving organization and push the frontiers of synthetic biology. Company culture is key to Asimov, and ours is a culture of recombination; we believe that our mission can only be achieved by bringing together a diverse team with a mixture of backgrounds and perspectives.
Job Specification