Assistant Professor

**Location**
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University of Warwick Campus, Coventry

**Department**
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Warwick Medical School - Biomedical Sciences

**Position Type**
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Full Time, Permanent

**Salary**
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£45,585 - £54,395 per annum

**About the Role**
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**About You**
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- Conduct groundbreaking research in the field publishing in prestigious journals and securing external research fellowships and/or grants
- Develop and deliver high-quality undergraduate and postgraduate teaching related to Cell Surface Dynamics
- Mentor and guide students in their academic and research endeavours and contribute to the wider activities of the department
- Collaborate with colleagues to contribute to the growth of the cross-departmental excellence cluster

**About the Department**
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**Our Ambition for the Centre for Mechanochemical Cell Biology (CMCB)**

the cell membrane works. Over the years, Warwick’s researchers have built expertise in harnessing multiple experimental and computational approaches to address questions in this area. Our infrastructure has also expanded considerably to provide practical support for this research, with an excellent suite of microscopes (ranging from light to cryo-electron), organic synthesis, and microfluidics and nanotechnology facilities Current research activities contributing to this exciting area are distributed across our campus with contributions from Warwick Medical School, the School of Life Sciences, Chemistry and Physics. There is a great enthusiasm for bringing these investigators together to create a centre that is larger than the sum of its parts.

This work will make a unique contribution to the UK and global research landscapes. Whilst there are already some excellent research centres in membrane biology in the UK, this work will consider the cell surface as a composite of lipids, proteins, carbohydrates, and the underlying

cytoskeleton and seek to understand the cell surface in its entirety. It will also draw substantially on principles from soft condensed matter and experimental physics, organic chemistry, and computational simulation to understand the cell surface as a chemical composite.

Further, the focus in many UK-based centres is to understand important molecular mechanisms of medically focused questions that lead to drug discovery and protein-based therapies. By contrast, we aim to understand cell surface organisation (from nano to mesoscales) that leads to cell and tissue scale morphogenesis. This integrated approach to the science of the cell surface, which is so fundamentally important for all aspects of life on our planet, has the strong potential to lead to innovative solutions that will benefit the wide public.

In addition, the co-location of this new team alongside existing CMCB colleagues will facilitate unique and new collaborations between researchers working on ‘how transport of molecules and cell parts are orchestrated’ and those working on ‘how the cell surface is assembled and how it functions.’

CMCB researchers have expertise in measuring forces generated by individual molecules (in the order of piconewtons). This, and similar transferable technologies, can be implemented to address cell surface level questions. The expansion of this team will drive the sharing of expertise and equipment and will build a vigorous research culture focused on making new discoveries that may not be readily possible elsewhere. The wider University also brings long-standing strengths in mathematics and a £400M STEM Grand Challenge that will provide physical sciences infrastructure for the next century and an ambition to drive medical technology, artificial intelligence and digital health.

WMS is a young medical school with big ambitions and a track record of success across research, innovation, and education. Translational research is at the heart of our strategic ambition. We are committed to leveraging cutting-edge interdisciplinary research that seeks to intercept human disease and health challenges before symptoms manifest and to develop/test/evaluate interventions that can curtail disease progression and limit impact on human populations. We strive to be innovative, bold, interdisciplinary, and inspiring, while ensuring a positive research culture and an advocacy for open science.

The University of Warwick is one of the UK’s remarkable success stories. Within 50 years, we have become one of the country’s best universities, consistently in the top 10 of UK league tables and rapidly climbing the international rankings of world-class universities. We are a centre of excellence for learning and research with an ambition to innovate and build partnerships with industry and the health care sector.

For further information about Warwick Medical School, please visit our website.

**About the University**
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Born in the 60s with a mindset of boldness, imagination and col