Postdoctoral Research Associate

Job description

A fully funded postdoctoral position is immediately available in the laboratory of Christopher Vakoc in the Molecular Oncology Division of the Department of Oncology at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. The Vakoc laboratory studies how transcriptional and epigenetic mechanisms contribute to cancer initiation, maintenance, and therapeutic vulnerability. A central goal of the lab is to define the gene regulatory circuitry that sustains malignant cell states and to use this knowledge to uncover new therapeutic targets. The lab has a strong track record of identifying cancer dependencies through high-throughput genetic screening and then advancing those findings through detailed mechanistic studies in cell-based and in vivo model systems. Research in the laboratory spans several complementary areas, including CRISPR-based functional genomics, transcriptional and epigenetic regulation, chromatin biology, biochemical reconstitution, cancer cell state control, and in vivo studies of gene regulation in tissue contexts. The group has studied these questions across a range of cancer types, and expansion into pediatric malignancies represents a particularly important opportunity for futu...