Postdoctoral Researcher for Developing Technology in the Field of Cancer Biomechanics

Postdoctoral Researcher for Developing Technology in the Field of Cancer Biomechanics

Aalto University

Otaniemi, Finland

In this position, you will work on microscopy-integrable measurement technologies used to study three-dimensional cell culture models of breast cancer tissues. This postdoctoral position is supported by the Cell-Scale Biomechanics Lab , and is part of the lab’s recent technology-development projects, aimed at improving the accuracy of drug efficacy screening for chemotherapy. 

This position’s focus is on developing engineered systems and methods to quantify the physical interactions between migrating cancer cells and the extracellular matrix, as well as advancing related technologies toward biomedical applications. The successful candidate will contribute to our lab’s microscale studies on the role of extracellular matrix mechanics, particularly in chemoresistance. Notably, the biological aspects of chemoresistance and drug efficacy screening will be the responsibility of the lab’s postdoctoral biologist, who will work together with the postdoctoral researcher to be hired. Applicants are encouraged to familiarize themselves with our existing publications.

In this work, there is also an expectation to be innovation-oriented, to help us drive the gradual development of these technologies toward real-world applications. This involves engineering experimental hardware for cell culturing workflows, optimizing experimental processes, and automatization. In discussion with the successful candidate, they will choose further research areas within our group, such as enhancing the spatial and temporal resolution of the measurements, and integrating simultaneous data acquisition with fluorescence live-cell microscopy. This postdoctoral position offers the opportunity to develop technologies for acquiring novel data on cancer tissue biomechanics—information that has been previously unavailable and could benefit the broader biomedical community, including the pharmaceutical industry.

Qualifications

• PhD-level degree in electrical engineering, physics, mechanical engineering or another relevant field applicable to the measurement technology development. For this position, we are unable to consider significantly different backgrounds, such as biology- and simulation-focused.
• Expected experience in the following or related areas, particularly in experimental work: biophysics, rheology, soft matter physics, and microrobotics.
• Further beneficial experience includes projects in biomedical instrumentation, experimental hardware automation and programming, and computational science.
• The quality and the relevance of the applicant’s scientific publications are a key criterion in our evaluation.

Our research projects require the skills to work in a self-driven, independent manner, and the abilities to collaborate with others. These projects are collaborative not just within our team but also domestically and internationally. A successful candidate will be open to learning new research areas in the collaborations. With a high research performance, there are potential opportunities for researcher mobility in collaborating research groups, stationed at Karolinska Institute, ETH Zurich, and Stanford University. The postdoctoral candidate is expected to possess strong scientific writing skills, and a willingness to further develop them. Besides, a fluent spoken English is needed in this work.

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