Postdoctoral Fellow in Time-resolved and Room-temperature Crystallography

About the role

The Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), which operates the three macromolecular crystallography beamlines of the Swiss Light Source SLS and the Cristallina-MX endstation at SwissFEL, is recruiting a Postdoctoral Fellow in Time-resolved and Room-temperature Crystallography for its Macromolecular Crystallography group in the Center for Photon Science. The project develops Cryo2RT approaches combining cryogenic sample handling with room-temperature, multi-temperature and time-resolved crystallography on standard MX beamlines. The position is limited to 2 years, with a possible 1-year extension, and starts by agreement.

Key responsibilities

• Work at the new PXI-VESPA endstation and other SLS MX beamlines with beamline scientists, detector and software experts.
• Implement and run time-resolved experiments: substrate/ligand droplet mixing with a picolitre injector and microsecond pump-probe experiments (laser-induced temperature jump, photocaged compounds) using the JUNGFRAU detector.
• Apply these methods to dynamic structural enzymology to capture reaction intermediates and conformational changes.
• Establish serial synchrotron crystallography SSX workflows on cryo-compatible fixed-target chips (e.g. IMISX, MISP-chip).
• Characterise X-ray-induced heating and radiation damage at room temperature on micro- to millisecond time scales and derive data-collection protocols.
• Publish results, present at international conferences and support external users and collaborators.

Required profile

• PhD in structural biology, biophysics, biochemistry, chemistry, physics or a related field.
• Hands-on experience in macromolecular crystallography, from data collection and processing to structure determination and refinement.
• Experience in serial and/or time-resolved crystallography at synchrotrons or XFELs.
• Strong interest in method and instrumentation development and enjoyment of interdisciplinary teamwork at a large research facility.
• Very good written and spoken English.
• Desirable: protein production and (micro)crystallisation, reaction initiation or enzyme kinetics.
• Desirable: programming skills (e.g. Python) and experience with serial data-processing software (e.g. CrystFEL, XDS) or radiation-damage studies.

Candidates apply online through the PSI careers site, with a list of publications and two referees, by 10 January 2027.