08 Postdoctoral Fellowship at University of Helsinki, Finland

The ERC-funded project “Properties of Units and Standards” is looking to employ a full-time postdoctoral researcher to complete a small team of socio-cultural anthropologists. The research team is led by Dr Matti Eräsaari, an economic anthropologist who has carried out ethnographic research in Fiji and Finland on topics such as time, exchange, food, and value.

The group is seeking for two dedicated and enthusiastic post-doctoral researchers holding a PhD degree in Cell & Developmental Biology, Evolutionary Biology, Bioinformatics, or similar. In addition, the Postdoctoral candidates will have a proven record of excellence in the above-mentioned research areas. Previous experience with multi-omics or 3D imaging data analysis and wet-lab work would be an asset for the positions. 

Your role is to carry out research on the structures and organization of proteins creating cell-cell contacts. We offer you a highly supportive, collaborative, and international research environment. Our research is aimed at understanding the structure and function of cellular macromolecular complexes and enveloped viruses. We apply a range of methods, including cryo-EM, advanced fluorescence microscopy methods, and correlative imaging. We are also active in developing computational methods for cryo-EM data processing. The working language of the laboratory is English. For more information, please visit https://www.helsinki.fi/lsb.

The postdoctoral researcher focuses on designing virtual reality (VR) environments with varying greenery features and seasons to be used for controlled experiments of greenery exposure during travel. The postdoctoral researcher will participate in the experimentations in various study cities together with the rest of the project team. Depending on the expertise and interest, the postdoctoral researcher may also contribute to the other parts of the project. E.g., skills in computer vision allow participation in creating human perspective indicators of urban greenery that could be widely applicable in urban planning in the future. Overall, the postdoctoral researcher is welcomed to take part in the Lab activities at large, and may teach and supervise students in the Geography Master’s Programme or Urban Studies and Planning Programme.

The overall goal is to discover how the tumor cells evade the immune system in ovarian cancer, with prospects of leading to major scientific breakthroughs and successful translation of the findings into clinical trials. In the EU funded project SPACE, we aim to integrate genomic profiles (WES, shallow WGS, ctDNA, RNAseq), and single-cell spatial proteomic and transcriptomic data and associate the findings to clinical data using machine learning. Learn more about the project from our web pages: http://farkkilab.org/space

We are looking for a skilled postdoctoral fellow with a computational, mathematical, statistical,  and/or bioinformatic background in genetics and functional genomics at the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland  FIMM, Helsinki Institute of Life Science, HiLIFE in the research groups of Professor Aarno Palotie (Research Group Palotie) and Dr. Olli Pietiläinen (Research Group Pietiläinen). The position is part of research program that aims to discover biological mechanisms in schizophrenia and related neuropsychiatric disorders. The program bridges multidisciplinary group of researchers in the interface of genetic discoveries and multi-omic molecular biology using collections from over 500 000 genotyped participants from clinical and population studies with medical data. These include the FinnGen (https://www.finngen.fi/en)  and SUPER studies (https://www.superfinland.fi/english). The Palotie group applies modern large-scale genetic analysis approaches to discover genetic mechanisms in common diseases with focus on neurological, neurodevelopmental, and neuropsychiatric traits. Palotie leads major research efforts at the University of Helsinki and The Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. The Pietiläinen group combines state-of-art functional genomics and molecular cell biology approaches to understand how genetic risk factors identified in the disorders mediate their causative effects in human cells. The Pietiläinen laboratory is based at the Neuroscience Center and has close links with the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard (https://www.broadinstitute.org/stanley). 

The postdoctoral researcher will work on the project BIOISLAND Biodiversity loss in freshwaters under changing environment – lessons from island diatoms (2022-2026) funded by the Academy of Finland. Our aim is to examine freshwater diatom functional and taxonomical biodiversity patterns and drivers on islands and continents and explain and predict biodiversity variation using key ecosystem characteristics such as ecosystem area, age, isolation, land use and water chemistry. We use both observational global and regional diatom data sets and conduct field campaigns and experiments at smaller spatial scales. Overall, forthcoming results will increase our understanding of how ecosystem fragmentation affects biodiversity in freshwaters. Main collaborators of the project include top researchers from France, US and China. The research project is led by Professor Janne Soininen https://blogs.helsinki.fi/jhsoinin/ and work will be done in his Aquatic Community Ecology group.