PhD Fellowship in Scientific Database Development: gaining molecular understanding and improving selectivity in treatments of CNS-related disorders

The Computational Drug Design Group (Gloriam group), University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark and ENAMINE, Research and Development, Kiev, Ukraine wishes to employ a 3-year PhD Fellow for a Scientific Database Development project. The project starts 1. December 2018 or as soon as possible.

Groups
ENAMINE (Kiev, Ukraine) will employ the fellow for the first 32 months. You will first train for 15 months at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark) – the first 8 months jointly with 3 other project PhD Fellows. The next 17 months will be spent with two other fellow PhD students at ENAMINE (Kiev, Ukraine). During the final 4 months of the fellowship, the employer will be the University of Copenhagen, however with a flexible work place, as it is custom to use this time to write the PhD thesis with little other work.

The employer ENAMINE, has the world’s largest in-stock catalogue comprising over 2 million compounds and an excellent expertise in chemical databases and structure-based drug/ligand design.

The Gloriam group (gloriamgroup.org) conducts bioinformatics, scientific data analysis and computational drug design, tightly integrated with leading chemists and pharmacologists, and structure-function studies of G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) – one of the largest drug target families. The group heads the GPCR community’s main database and web server, GPCRdb (GPCRdb.org) serving ~2,500 monthly users. The group has 15 members and has in the last 1.5 years published in e.g. Nature, Nature Chemistry, Nucleic Acids Research and Bioinformatics.

Project
This position is one of five that are part of the EU-funded project, SAFER (www.safer-itn.eu). This is an ambitious interdisciplinary European Industrial Doctorates (EID) programme under the Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA-ITN-EID, Grant agreement: 765657), which offers positions with competitive salaries and family allowances. All five PhD students/Researchers will obtain ample scientific, business and transferrable skills at excellent research environments meriting themselves for international academic or industrial careers.

The ultimate scientific goal for the SAFER program is to gain molecular understanding and improve selectivity in treatments of CNS-related disorders. This will be done with a particular focus on the serotonin 5-HT2A receptor – the primary target for many pharmaceuticals and hallucinogens. SAFER will design and prepare ligands for the receptor, generate and cross-interpret pharmacology and crystallographic data, and construct computational mechanistic models and databases that can explain and guide its experiments. This is fundamental to understand the biological and therapeutic effects, and to develop safer drugs.

Qualification requirements
Mandatory requirements
• A MSc degree in in bioinformatics, computer sciences or similar
• Solid knowledge in shell scripting, programming in Python or other languages, and web development
• Some experience of molecular biology
• Experience of data analysis
• Demonstrated ability to independently learn new concepts and solve biological problems
• Fluency in English and experience in writing scientific texts
• The candidate must have less than 4 years of full time equivalent research experience and not have a doctoral degree, but may have submitted a PhD thesis.
• The candidate must not have resided or carried out his/her main activity in Ukraine for more than 12 months during the last 3 years immediately prior to the recruitment. Nationality is not an issue.

Additional meriting qualifications
Experience of, and skills in:
• G protein-coupled receptors
• Analysis of molecular structures

Key criteria for the assessment of applicants
• Professional qualifications relevant to the project
• Relevant work experience
• Publications
• Other professional activities
• Language skills
• Good interpersonal skills

Terms of employment
The successful candidate will receive a salary in accordance with the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions regulations and will be offered employment conditions in accordance with the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions regulations for early stage researchers and Ukranian legislation. The exact salary will be specified in the employment contract.

The employer will provide a safe and secure working environment, and the employee must comply with general safety requirements, will be trained and obliged to sign the corresponding safety statement. Enamine will provide nice guesthouse living apartments in the proximity of Kiev and the Enamine site for a favourable price, if needed.

The SAFER project will finance the first 30 months of employment. Thereafter, the successful candidate will be offered additional employment for another 6 months. These 6 months of employment will be financed by other sources.


Application
The application, in English, must be submitted in the online application form and cannot be submitted via email. The application must include the following appendices:
Appendix 1: curriculum vitae with documentation of education.
Appendix 2: a complete list of publications and list of submitted appendices.
Appendix 3: documentation of additional research qualifications.

Questions
For further information, please contact Associate Professor David Gloriam via [Email Address Removed] or (+45) 93 56 54 49; or Professor Igor Komarov at Enamine via [Email Address Removed]. Please note that applications cannot be submitted via email, but only via the online application system.

Deadline: 07-10-2018