Research associate and postdoctoral fellow positions are available in Dr. Zhihao Wu’s laboratory in the Department of Biological Sciences at Southern Methodist University in Dallas TX. The positions are supported by Southern Methodist University, CPRIT (Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas) and ModeGene LLC to investigate the role of co-translational quality control in the pathogenesis of neurological diseases, including age-related neurodegenerative diseases and glioma. The long-term goal of research in the Wu lab is to uncover the fundamental mechanism of diverse cellular quality control systems in responding stress and maintaining cellular homeostasis in eukaryotic cells.  It will enhance our understanding of proteostasis failure induced by aberrant translation products in mitochondrial dysfunction in neurological diseases. Our ultimate mission also includes identifying the potential novel biomarkers and therapeutic strategies for these diseases. Our lab primarily uses Drosophila melanogaster and mice as the experimental systems, because of the availability of sophisticated genetic tools, and also various human cell line systems to test the conservation of the players and principles we uncovered. 

Our publications can be found here:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/myncbi/zhihao.wu.1/bibliography/public/ 

Young scientists with mice genetics and physiology backgrounds are welcome to join us. New recruits will work closely with Wu lab members to design and conduct experiments, analyze data, present them in conferences, and write papers and grants. Salaries, stipend, and benefits are competitive and commensurate with university policy and NIH scales. Postdoctoral fellow candidates must have a Ph.D. degree (or close to have one) in related areas. Prior experiences with mouse metabolism/surgery/behavior, ageing related studies, proteomics/metabolomics and bioinformatics are a plus.

Interested candidates should send a cover letter summarizing their research interests and CV with a publication list and names and contact information of three references (better in a single PDF file) to “zhihaowu@smu.edu”. Informal inquiries are also welcome.

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