Vacancies

While we currently do not have openings within the Pharma-IT Platform, very able students are always welcome to contact us and we will explore funding opportunities which depend on each particular applicant and project. Please see the contact page for ways to get in touch with us. We are looking forward to hearing from you!

3-yr Postdoc / 4-yr PhD Cheminformatics Position, Leiden / The Netherlands

** This vacancy has been filled! **

A fully-funded cheminformatics position with the Division of Medicinal Chemistry of the Leiden / Amsterdam Center for Drug Research (http://www.medchem.leidenuniv.nl) at Leiden University, the Netherlands, is available starting immediately (for applicants for a PhD position no later than the end of March 2008).

Depending on the current career stage of the applicant, this can either be a postdoctoral position, funded for three years, or a PhD position, funded for four years (which is the usual duration of a PhD in The Netherlands).

This work of this position will be centered around hERG channel pharmacophore prediction and refinement, as part of a project funded by the TI Pharma initiative (http://www.tipharma.com) on cardioxicity. Given the scarcity of publicly available hERG activity data one aim of the project is to expand available knowledge in the public domain on this important target. The project includes the assembly of a hERG blocker knowledge base, as well as the derivation of pharmacophore hypotheses in collaboration with synthetic chemists and biologists in order to guide the exploration of the chemical universe of hERG blockers.

The applicant is very much encouraged to bring in his/her own ideas in case of both a PhD and postdoc application with regard to the algorithms and methods used in this project. If the methods explored are applicable to other datasets this could provide an additional application. Publication of the work will be strongly encouraged.

Research directions currently actively pursued in the group are, among others, the connections between chemical structure and biological function across multiple targets[1] (sometimes referred to as chemogenomics[2]) and methods to analyze and visualize those relationships. Since the group is set to grow in the future, the applicant will also benefit from other bio- and cheminformatics research projects, as well as the close involvement with experimental medicinal chemistry, and, in the context of the TI Pharma initiative, with industry.

Requirements:

The most important requirements are a life science background (chemistry, biology, or related discipline) on the one hand and a computer science background (programming experience, or a computer science degree) on the other hand, as well as dedication to the work to be performed.

While this describes the most important ingredient of the applicant, a few formal necessities should be given nonetheless:

Experience in the following areas will be an advantage:

The salary will be according to experience and qualifications.

Please apply to Dr. Andreas Bender with

at the following address: bendera [!at%] chem.leidenuniv.nl

More information about the Leiden / Amsterdam Center for Drug Research can be found at this website: http://www.lacdr.nl

[1] D.W. Young et. al., Integrating high-content screening and ligand-target prediction to identify mechanism of action. Nature Chemical Biology, 2008, 4, 59 68. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nchembio.2007.53

[2] A. Bender et. al., Chemogenomic Data Analysis: Prediction of Small-Molecule Targets and the Advent of Biological Fingerprints. Comb. Chem. High-Throughp. Screen., 2007, 10, 719 731. http://dx.doi.org/10.2174/138620707782507313