Research Assistant - Structural Bioinformatics
Job Description
About Astera:
Astera is a private foundation on a mission to steer science and technology toward a better 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 accelerate innovation. This inflection point provides an unparalleled opportunity to fundamentally rethink the institutions, systems, and tools that drive progress. We have committed a $3.5B endowment to that work and fit the form of our support to the function it serves: grants, investments, and in-house research programs. We accept meaningful risk in the research we back and expect some of it to fail because transformative ideas are rarely the ones already proven. Our projects, and the foundation itself, operate like high-velocity startups, with a high performance bar and competitive compensation to match. We are searching for leaders who are compelled by the challenge of driving high-impact change in the way science is funded, conducted, and communicated. You can read more about our mission, vision, and programming at astera.org/vision.
About Prism:
Prism is a program within Radial, the basic life sciences division of the Astera Institute. We are making protein motion measurable, predictable, and actionable by building open infrastructure for studying protein dynamics directly from experimental data. Function emerges from the ensemble of conformations a protein adopts and how it moves between them, and we are rebuilding the structural biology stack around that premise: data collection, modeling, representation, and interpretation. We work at the interface of experimental structural biology (crystallography, cryo-EM), machine learning, computational biophysics, and open scientific tooling. Our team spans computational biologists, ML researchers, software engineers, and program staff, collaborating across Radial, Astera, and partner institutions.
Key Responsibilities
Maintain and run bioinformatic pipelines for structural data processing, curation, and quality control.
Support development and benchmarking of validation metrics against experimental datasets.
Assist with data deposition, formatting, and documentation to meet community data standards.
Help prepare datasets, figures, and summaries for publications, reports, and presentations.
Coordinate with Scientists and engineers on routine data management tasks and troubleshooting.
Required Skills and Qualifications
BS or MS in bioinformatics, structural biology, computational biology, or a related field.
Working proficiency in Python and familiarity with structural file formats (PDB, mmCIF, mtz).
Strong organizational skills and close attention to detail in data handling.
Comfortable working across computational and experimental teams in a research setting.
Preferred: exposure to crystallography or cryo-EM data processing; familiarity with PDB, EMDB, or related databases.
Compensation
Commensurate with experience.