Jobs

Job opportunity at CRUK Beatson Drug Discovery Unit

Cancer Research UK Beatson Institute, Drug Discovery Unit – Glasgow

Team Lead – Computational Chemistry

Salary Range £37,288 to £63,917 depending on experience

The Drug Discovery Unit at the CRUK Beatson Institute in Glasgow, is a Cancer Research UK funded team of highly experienced scientists engaged in discovering and developing cancer drug treatments of the future. The aim of the Unit is to work closely with local cancer experts to maximise the opportunity to develop new and innovative therapies that strike at the core of cancer pathology. Using state of the art screening, advanced structural biology, industry standard computational and medicinal chemistry and complex biological modelling systems, the Drug Discovery team at the Beatson is tackling some of the most challenging targets in cancer biology today.

An exciting opportunity has arisen within the Beatson Drug Discovery Unit to lead a team of computational chemistry and machine learning scientists.

Playing an influential role in our drug discovery projects, you will work collaboratively with chemists, crystallographers, biophysicists, protein scientists, and biologists at the Beatson and wider CRUK network to help formulate innovative and forward thinking approaches towards tackling exciting and challenging drug target classes.

The role requires you to use your significant computational chemistry experience to develop innovative solutions to help drive our medicinal chemistry-driven projects from fragment-based hit identification through to lead optimisation. The high quality information and ideas you generate will form a critical part of driving our drug discovery programmes forward, informing small molecule property design and structure-based drug design.

The candidate should have expert knowledge of programs (such as MOE, Schrödinger, Molsoft and ADMET Predictor) and computational techniques, data visualization (e.g. Dotmatics Vortex) and pipelining tools (e.g. PipelinePilot, Knime) used in an industry-standard drug discovery setting. In addition you should ideally have experience of supervising or managing a small team of research scientists.

Skills and Experience:

  • Ph.D. in computational chemistry, cheminformatics or a related field
  • Significant experience in structure-based drug design in a pharmaceutical and/or at a CRO setting
  • Demonstrated strong track record in application of computational tools to successful advancement of drug discovery projects
  • Experience in applying quantum mechanics, molecular dynamics and free energy perturbation calculations in drug design
  • Excellent knowledge of at least one programming or scripting language (such as Python, Java, C++ and R)
  • Expert knowledge of UNIX/Linux and queueing systems
  • Experience in applying machine learning techniques in a drug design setting
  • Experience of line management or supervision of people
  • The ability to lead the development of platform technologies within the BDDU
  • Strong oral and written communication skills with a very collaborative mindset
  • Ability to work independently and collaboratively in a multidisciplinary, team-oriented environment
  • Maintain and develop working knowledge of state-of-the-art computational chemistry methods and their application to drug design

In return, we offer an inspiring, supportive and multi-disciplinary environment in a state-of-the-art, purpose-built laboratory in which to further enhance your skills and knowledge of structural sciences, biophysics, cancer biology and drug discovery; providing you the opportunity to make a real difference to the lives of cancer patients.

Applications must be made through our website http://www.beatson.gla.ac.uk/Careers/Drug-Discovery/.

Informal enquiries are welcome and should be addressed to Justin Bower; j.bower@beatson.gla.ac.uk (Joint Head of Beatson Drug Discovery Unit)

Closing date for applications is 19th February 2021