Postdoctoral Researcher: Structural Biology

Union: Non-Union
Number of Vacancies: 1
New or Replacement Position: New
Site: Princess Margaret Cancer Centre
Department: Research
Reports to: Senior Scientist
Hours: 37.5 Hours Per Week
Salary Range: $54,902 - $71,372 Annually
Shifts: Monday - Friday
Status: Temporary Full-time
Closing Date: March 16, 2026

Program: Mitacs Accelerate Umbrella - Target 2035 Fellows

Position Summary:
We are seeking a highly motivated Postdoctoral Researcher with experience in X-ray Crystallography to join an ambitious, data-driven drug discovery program at the interface of structural biology, chemical biology, and artificial intelligence. This role will play a central part in hit characterisation for LIGAND-AI, generating high-quality protein-ligand co-crystal structures that directly inform structure-based drug discovery research programs, the development of machine learning models and enable international benchmarking challenges.

The Postdoctoral Researcher will focus on structure determination of protein-ligand complexes spanning key biological pathways including epigenetics, ubiquitin signalling, gene regulation, and DNA repair. These structures will not only drive internal hit validation and SAR development but will also feed into global open science efforts and benchmarking initiatives such as CASP, helping define the next generation of AI-enabled drug discovery.

This is an exciting opportunity to work at the frontier of structural biology and AI, where experimentally rigorous crystallographic data are treated as first-class training data for machine learning. The successful candidate will contribute to a growing portfolio of high-impact structures designed to stress-test, validate, and improve LIGAND-AI predictions in real-world drug discovery settings.

The Postdoctoral Researcher will be embedded in a highly collaborative early-stage drug discovery team, working closely with medicinal chemists, computational scientists, machine learning experts, automation engineers, and biochemists. Together, the team integrates structure, chemistry, and data science to rapidly advance hit matter and generate benchmark-quality datasets with broad community value.

Duties:

• Lead X-ray crystallography efforts for hit characterisation, including crystallisation, ligand soaking/co-crystallisation, data collection, and structure refinement
• Generate high-resolution protein-ligand complex structures to interrogate ligand hits and validate predictions, helping to guide SAR development
• Design, execute, and troubleshoot experiments across protein expression, purification, and biophysical characterisation as needed to support structural work
• Analyse and interpret crystallographic data in close collaboration with medicinal chemists and computational scientists to inform compound optimisation
• Contribute structurally rigorous datasets to AI benchmarking and open science initiatives (e.g., CASP, Beacon, Target 2035)
• Maintain high-quality experimental records using electronic laboratory notebooks, ensuring data and metadata are reproducible, shareable, and publication-ready
• Present results clearly in interdisciplinary project meetings and contribute to manuscripts, preprints, and public data releases
• Foster a collaborative, rigorous, and open research culture aligned with best practices in modern structural biology