The Children’s Cancer Research Institute/Vienna Austria

The Children´s Cancer Research Institute, St. Anna Kinderkrebsforschung, cooperates with the St. Anna Children’s Hospital and is a multidisciplinary, internationally networked competence center whose aim is to improve the cure-rate of children and adolescents with cancer through research and development. The CCRI and the St. Anna Kinderspital are known for providing the highest quality of childhood cancer patient care and development of new treatment strategies, respectively.

POSTDOCTORAL Research Position limited to 2 years and fellow with 4-10 years of experience
Project MODICELL financed by the EU (Marie Curie IAPP Action)
Work on T cell tolerance to Start: 01-03-2013

Project MODICELL is a Marie Curie Industry-Academia Partnerships and Pathways (IAPP) action. It aims at improving the understanding of the molecular background of T cell polarization towards immune tolerance versus immune effector function by combining advanced wet lab and dry lab approaches. An essential part of this program is the generation of allo-specific tolerant T cells which are ultimately useful for adoptive transfer to recipients of hematopoietic stem cell transplantation.
The international post holder will carry out and supervise a comprehensive approach of generating T cell tolerance by investigating co-stimulation blockade (targeting CD28) in combination with deletional tolerance (agonist PD-1/PD-L1 pathway) with and without adjuvants (heat shock proteins).

Duties and Responsibilities

• A strong background in cellular and molecular immunology.
• Engage in project management, as appropriate.
• Participate in training events in bioinformatics, systems immunology, immune modeling as provided by the MODICELL program.
• Engage in dissemination of novel findings, including first-author publications and presentations in meetings.
• Mentoring research graduate students and PhD students.

Benefits

• Competitive Salary according to EU guidelines.
• Family monthly allowance.
• International exchange with partners specified in bioinformatics and systems immunology.
• Excellent career development plan.
• Living in Vienna, one of the best capitals in the world to live.

Selection criteria

• PhD degree and less than 10 years research experience.
• Strong commitment to scientific research.
• Excellent expertise in cell based assays, immune cell characterization (phenotyping, cytokine profiling, etc.) cytotoxic assays, flow cytometry, ELISPOT technology, Immunoblotting, PCR.
• Publication record.
• Grant writing skills.
• Excellent communication skills (oral, written, presentation).
• Excellent team-working spirit.

Review of applications will begin in late-January 2013 and continue until the position is filled. We support potential candidates to identify suitable employment opportunities for spouses or partners.