Director, Biophysics (Los Angeles CA or Princeton NJ)
CHDI Management
- Los Angeles, CA
- Permanent
- Full-time
- Manage external biophysics resources at CRO partners by providing strategic and technical oversight of biophysical assay deployment across the CHDI project portfolio.
- Collaborate with partners including HD biology-focused thematic areas, structural biologists, medicinal chemists and informaticians. Participate as a biophysics domain knowledge expert to interdisciplinary project teams.
- Co-develop project workplans as a member of interdisciplinary project teams with strategic line-of-sight to achieve program objectives.
- Generate and deliver impactful biophysical data and insight to characterize biomolecular interactions and provide discovery teams with detailed interaction analyses (e., protein-compound, nucleic acid-compound, protein-protein, and protein-nucleic acid) in cell-free and cellular systems.
- Develop and deploy ligand-protein interaction experiments using biophysical methods (e.g. SPR, ITC, NMR, thermal shift, native MS) to measure binding of small molecule hits and leads to potential drug targets.
- Design and conduct experiments to deconvolute biophysical mechanisms of active agents to understand residence time, predict efficacy and pharmacology, and select the best molecules for pharmacologic proof-of-concept.
- Collaborate with the Research Informatics and Computational Drug Discovery team to prepare, organize, combine and integrate biophysics data and accelerate the development of tool compounds
- Identify and partner with external collaborators (CRO, academic) to develop impactful, cutting-edge biophysical methods for their strategic application to projects in support of Foundation objectives.
- PhD. in Biophysics, Biophysical Chemistry, Chemistry and Chemical Biology or a related discipline.
- 6 plus years of industry experience in target validation and/or integrated drug discovery projects.
- Demonstrated expertise in the use of biophysical methods (SPR, GCII, HTRF, MST, AS-MS, SwitchSense and thermal stability assays such as DSF) for characterization of biomolecular interactions (protein-compound, nucleic acid-compound, protein-protein, and/or protein-nucleic acid).
- Experience in designing and building mechanistic assays to support elucidation of novel disease-relevant biology and target validation.
- Experience in the application of emerging biophysical methods (e.g., single-molecule fluorescence microscopy, single-molecule force microscopy, magnetic force microscopy to interrogate macromolecular assemblies within their native environment highly preferred.
- Experience working in a multidisciplinary team-oriented environment.
- Excellent written and oral communication skills.
- Experience in oversight of CRO collaborators.