Post-Doctoral Fellow in Vaccine Development

Available immediately.

The Center for Vaccine Development and Global Health (CVD) brings together more than four decades of innovative and life-saving research on vaccines and infectious diseases. http://www.medschool.umaryland.edu/cvd/

As an organized research center within the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM), CVD comprises a multi-disciplinary team of faculty and staff whose primary mission is to develop, evaluate, and implement vaccines and other interventions to reduce illness and mortality domestically and in less developed countries. We work to prevent and treat enteric and respiratory diseases, to reduce the threat of malaria and antimicrobial resistance, and to identify, understand and combat other tropic and emerging pathogens burdening low resource settings. Training is a critical component of our work to ensure the foundation for the next generation of scientists and researchers committed to our mission.

We are seeking postdoctoral fellows who will participate in immunological studies directed at understanding immune responses and uncovering immunological correlates of protection following immunization and infection in humans with the long-term goal of accelerating the development of novel vaccines. Studies will include exploration of the mechanisms operative in the generation of systemic and mucosal immunity in children, young adults and the elderly and their relationship to the gut microbiota. These studies will involve participants immunized with licensed or investigational attenuated and subunit vaccines, as well as volunteers challenged with wild-type organisms. Studies will involve the use of advanced technologies and instrumentation such as high-parameter flow cytometry and mass cytometry (40+ parameters/cell) with a focus on complex data analyses, as well as the performance of a variety of molecular biology and immunological techniques depending on the research questions being addressed. These include, among others, functional assays (e.g., cell purification, proliferation, cytotoxic T cell activity, Elispot, regulatory T cell activity, identification of T cell epitopes, B cell maturation and function), single cell transcriptomics (scRNA-seq), epigenetic landscape determinations, and role of microRNAs (miRNA) in the regulation of immunity.