Associate Scientist - Protein Purification and Characterization Development (TE2)

Ginkgo is a high-growth, well-capitalized public biotech company in Boston that is redesigning the living world to solve some of the globe's growing challenges in health, energy, food, materials, and more. Ginkgo is constructing, editing, and redesigning the living world in order to answer the globe's growing challenges in health, energy, food, materials, and more. Our mission to "make biology easier to engineer" is poised to disrupt multiple industries by leveraging our innovative data, automation, and scale in biological engineering.

In order to support Ginkgo's mission of making biology easier to engineer, the Protein Purification and Characterization (PPC) team is seeking a motivated protein scientist with experience in protein purification (recombinant proteins, enzymes, AAVs, VLPs, antibodies) and related biochemical and biophysical characterization for applications across a broad range of chemical and pharmaceutical industries. The successful candidate will become an integral part of Ginkgo's programs, supporting the use of proteins in applications ranging from biosynthetic enzymes, food proteins, therapeutics and others.

Responsibilities

• Science (Method and Assay Development)




• Apply knowledge of chemical, biochemical, and biophysical principles to design methods and assays that can be executed in high throughput to purify proteins and measure protein abundance, function, and other properties
• Develop novel purification methods to purify enzyme and non-enzyme proteins, protein nanoparticles (AAVs, VLPs), and biologics (antibodies and antibody-variants) at low, medium, and high throughput
• Develop novel automated high-throughput methods for protein characterization based on electrophoresis, light-scattering, blotting, etc. to assess protein purity and biophysical characterization
• Provide expert guidance leveraging a deep understanding of biological principles in optimizing soluble protein expression through strain engineering, strain selection, small-scale fermentation process and lysis optimization.
• Understand the impact of microbial growth and fermentation on assays of interest and design small-scale fermentation conditions that will be predictive of assay results at larger scales
• Design, execute, and analyze method development experiments to demonstrate proof of principle of new methods, de-risk sources of method interference or bias, optimize and validate the methods in high-throughput workcells

• Science (Screen Execution)




• Execute screens in high-throughput using a suite of automated instruments and integrated workcells, including liquid handlers, microplate readers, mass spectrometers, HPLCs, high to mid-dimensional screens, and others, working in high-density microplate formats (384- and 1536-well plates)
• Coordinate with Core and Operations teams to support their work in Screen Execution
• Use a variety of software packages and write scripts for programming liquid handlers (in-house and third-party tools), designing and viewing DNA sequences, processing data, and performing statistical analysis (Spotfire, Python, JMP) laboratory information management system (LIMS), database management (in-house and third-party tools), and third-party lab instrumentation and automation software




• Software




• Use a variety of software packages and write scripts for programming liquid handlers (in-house and third-party tools), designing and viewing DNA sequences, processing data, and performing statistical analysis (Spotfire, Python, JMP) laboratory information management system (LIMS), database management (in-house and third-party tools), and third-party lab instrumentation and automation software




• Data science, data management, and statistical analysis




• Use Spotfire to analyze and apply advanced statistical techniques to method development experiments and executed high-throughput screens, and upload these results in a structured, standardized format into company databases
• Build robust applications capable of managing complex, large volumes of data resulting in new biological insights
• Apply statistical Design of Experiment principles to design assay optimization experiments and analyze the results to identify optimal conditions for future experiments and screens




• Automation




• Establish understanding of automated liquid handlers (Hamilton Star series, Prime, Echo, Tempest, FPLC, HPLC, Lynx) to be able to create and execute new liquid handling procedures and independently troubleshoot errors that arise during execution
• Understand and incorporate the constraints of automated liquid handlers into experiment and procedure design, and understand how different instruments may introduce bias into experimental data




• Project scoping/planning/sales




• Work with Commercial teams in planning and scoping new projects, meet with potential and current customers to understand their needs, and propose both standardized and bespoke solutions to their problems, review proposals, and plan project timelines in alignment with customer requirements and milestone deadlines




• Project management




• Within a project, work with the project leader to coordinate on strategic elements of the project that may impact, but are not necessarily within the scope of work of, HTS. This can include strategic components of genetic design, protein engineering, cell transformation, analytical chemistry teams, and fermentation
• In some cases, may serve as project lead for internal development projects or projects that heavily lean on HTS capabilities




• Communication




• Communicate to a broad range of stakeholders, including providing detailed technical communications to scientific stakeholders and high-level, abstracted, accessible communications to leadership, executive, and external audiences, including customers

Minimum Requirements

• Typically requires a Bachelor's degree and a minimum of 2 years of related experience; or an advanced degree without experience; or equivalent work experience.
• Demonstrated experience in protein engineering, protein purification or protein biochemistry. Hands on experience in chromatography and non-chromatography based protein purification methods and method optimization
• Demonstrated ability to deliver results while working independently as a laboratory scientist

Preferred Capabilities and Experience

• Established capability to design, conduct, optimize, and execute novel analytical assay development efforts in the lab supporting HTS and project deliverables.
• Experience developing methods and assays for molecular interactions, protein modifications, protein stability, protein binding and/or biophysical techniques & approaches (e.g., SPR, BLI, DSF, CD, etc.)
• Experience with automated liquid handlers eg. FPLC, HPLC, TECAN, Hamilton, Lynx etc
• Understanding of microbial metabolism and physiology
• Experience using laboratory automation equipment
• Experience in computational analysis of biological data and large data sets using general-purpose programming languages (such as Python, R, or Matlab)
• Familiarity with software and statistical platforms for documenting (ELN) and analyzing large data sets (e.g., JMP, Spotfire, or MODDE pro/DoE)
• Ability to clear and concisely present technical information to audiences of broad stakeholders