Doctoral fellowship positions available - University of Liege, Belgium

We are presently looking for two highly motivated doctoral fellows to work in the team of Bernard Peers in ZDDM lab on the differentiation of pancreatic cells in zebrafish (see website : http://www.giga.ulg.ac.be/jcms/c_2129024/fr/home ). The 2 PhD students will be recruited before September 2015 and will be paid for 3 years in the frame of the European ZENCODE-ITN project (see website http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/zencode-itn).

The two PhD fellows (ESR6 and ESR7) will work on the transcriptomic and epigenetic modifications occurring during the differentiation and maturation of endocrine pancreatic cells. Endodermal and pancreatic cells will be isolated at various stages of differentiation by FACS from zebrafish transgenic lines. RNA-seq and ATAC-seq will be performed on isolated cells to determine their transcriptome and the epigenome landscapes. One PhD fellow (ESR7) will study the transition of endoderm to pancreatic progenitor cells; this work will be performed in collaboration with Fiona Wardle (King’s College of London,UK). The second PhD student (ESR6) will be focused on the last steps of endocrine cell maturation. The two PhD students will have the opportunity to be trained for the bioinformatic analyses of their HTP sequence datasets by different European computational laboratories participating to the ZENCODE-ITN project.

Required qualifications:

• Strong background and Master in biology or related discipline.

• High motivation, excellent IT, and communication skills.

• Ability to work as part of a team and also to work independently using own initiative.

Eligibility conditions: The applicant must, at the time of recruitment by the host organisation, be in the first four years (full-time equivalent research experience) of their research careers and have not yet been awarded a doctoral degree. Full-time equivalent research experience is measured from the date when a researcher obtained the Master degree, which would formally entitle him or her to embark on a doctorate in either the host or home country.

Mobility: at the time of recruitment, researchers must not have resided or carried out their main activity (work, studies, etc) in Belgium for more than 12 months in the 3 years immediately prior to the reference date. Compulsory national service and/or short stays such as holidays are not taken into account.

For further information: Please contact Bernard Peers (Bpeers@ulg.ac.be) and Fiona Wardle (fiona.wardle@kcl.ac.uk) for further informations and applications. Please send us your CV , a motivation letter and 2 references. Deadline of applications : 1 May 2015.