Postdoctoral Research Associate - Chemical Biology & Therapeutics

A postdoc position is available immediately in the laboratory of Dr. Daniel Blair which focuses on developing direct-to-biology screening methods to identify antibiotics.

A postdoc position is available immediately in the laboratory of Dr Daniel Blair which focuses on developing direct-to-biology screening methods to identify antibiotics. This project seeks to capitalize on our recent development of modular strategies for making small molecules (Nature 2022) and rapid tandem mass-spectrometry methods to scout chemical reaction outcomes (Nature 2024). These techniques will be deployed toward creation of an antibiotic discovery platform. A suitable candidate will have a background in synthetic organic chemistry and/or chemical biology, experience with either microbiology or high-throughput experimentation is desirable but not a requirement.

The project will be executed in the Department of Chemical Biology and Therapeutics at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and builds on strong investments into a world-class infrastructure in chemical synthesis and chemical biology. Substantial resources have been deployed within the Blair laboratory to support this project including an automated synthesis machine, fully automated preparative LC-MS, 2-dimensional LC-MS, and a state-of-the-art high-throughput chemical synthesis platform.
 

Papers/Links:

M Hu, … D J Blair* Direct-to-Biology Enabled Molecular Glue Discovery ChemRxiv 2025

doi: 10.26434/chemrxiv-2025-4d7nq

M Hu… D J Blair* Continuous Collective Analysis of Chemical Reactions” Nature 2024

doi: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08211-4

DJ Blair and co-workers “Automated iterative Csp3-C bond formation.” Nature 2022

doi: 10.1038/s41586-022-04491-w

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/real-high-throughput-chemistry-through-mass-spec

RF Service “Machine builds druglike organic molecules in a snap” Science 2022

doi: 10.1126/science.ada1116

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