Scientist - Computational Biophysics

ABOUT ASTERA:

Astera is a private foundation on a mission to steer science and technology toward an abundant future. We believe the coming years will bring an era of unprecedented scientific and technological advancement as exponential progress in AI converges with central advances in other fields to dramatically accelerate innovation. This inflection point provides an unparalleled opportunity to fundamentally rethink the institutions, systems, and tools that drive scientific progress.

Unlike traditional non-profit research organizations, projects supported by Astera operate like high-velocity startups, allowing us to focus on ambitious goals, match structure to problem, and attract strong technical talent and leadership. You can read more about our mission, vision, and programming here https://astera.org/vision/.

ABOUT THE ROLE:

We are seeking a scientist to join the diffUSE Project, which focuses on developing next-generation protein representations that bridge dynamic structural biology to downstream functional applications. The diffUSE Project is an ambitious initiative designed to advance our understanding of protein dynamics by building the experimental methods, computational models, and global infrastructure needed to capture molecular motion at scale. Our goal is to establish dynamic structural biology as a foundational pillar of modern science, as transformative and indispensable as the Protein Data Bank has been for static structures.

In this role, you will help build ensemble-aware protein representations and/or metrics to enable the integration with other inputs such as protein language model (PLM), ligand binding data, mutational data, and/or functional information. You will design and maintain large-scale bioinformatic pipelines, manage complex datasets, develop metrics for dynamics and/or fine-tune or architect ML models to capture sequence-structure-function relationships. A key part of the role involves synthesizing diverse data sources t...