Transgenic Specialist

Job Summary:

The Biological Laboratories’ Aquatics Facilities can support live animal specimens for use by Molecular and Cellular Biology (MCB) and Organismic and Evolutionary Biology (OEB) members for research. The Transgenic Specialist aids Harvard undergraduate, graduate, post-docs and scholars in the use of the aquatics facilities by providing a point-person for generating transgenics of unconventional experimental animal systems to support the sciences of multiple laboratories.

Job-Specific Responsibilities:

• Independently coordinates with researchers on their projects, generating transgenics, overseeing crosses, breeding with additional wild caught animals to maintain populations, long-term planning and overall population management while working collaboratively with cross-functional teams, including molecular biologists, bioinformaticians, chemists, and clinical researchers at Harvard and other institutions. 

• Responsible for coordinating and facilitating design and implementation strategies for generating transgenic and cultured animals (including gene knockout, knock-in, and overexpression models), conducting, developing, validating, and organizing experimental protocols for genotyping (such as CRISPR/Cas9, and other gene-editing technologies to create precise genetic modifications), as well as phenotyping, and designing functional assays for all transgenic and cultured lines as well as analyzing experiments involving the creation and utilization of transgenic animals to advance our understanding of genetic functions, disease mechanisms, and potential therapeutic interventions in conjunction with lab heads and lab members.

• Maintains records and databases of all transgenesis and monitoring. 

• Maintain transgenic and cultured animal colonies, ensuring ethical and regulatory compliance including assisting with composing animal protocols.

• Assists with oversight of facility activities, including maintenance of equipment and inventory management.

• Trains community researchers (grad students, postdocs, interns) in creating and maintaining non-model transgenic and cultured lines.

• Helps maintain animal facility husbandry and care including water quality and maintenance, distribution of feeds, etc. and assisting with the design and building of animal housing and culture systems. Acts as a secondary point of contact for alarms of facility.

• Acts as team lead for coop interns, volunteers, and technicians with oversight from Aquatics facility manager.

• Helps facilitate public education programs involved with public relations, news, media, and outreach events.

 

Working Conditions:

• This position is based fully on-campus in Cambridge, MA