Postdoctoral Researchers in Mammalian Synthetic Biology / AI-Guided Genetic Design / Cell Therapy

The Bashor Lab in the Department of Bioengineering at Rice University is seeking motivated, creative, and curious postdoctoral researchers to develop new technologies for programming human cells. Our goal is to make mammalian cell engineering more predictive, scalable, and therapeutically actionable.

Our lab works at the interface of synthetic biology, mammalian cell engineering, cell-based therapies, and machine learning and artificial intelligence. Postdoctoral fellows will join a highly collaborative research environment at Rice, with access to a large and growing synthetic biology community and opportunities to work closely with engineers, biologists, computational scientists, and clinical collaborators in the nearby Texas Medical Center. Fellows will receive strong mentorship and career development support, with opportunities to lead independent projects, publish and present high-impact work, build collaborations, and prepare for careers in academia or biotechnology.

We are recruiting postdoctoral researchers who want to help build the next generation of programmable human cell technologies in two areas:

AI-guided genetic design of new cellular function. Projects in this area will develop AI-guided design-build-test-learn approaches for engineering genetic regulatory systems in mammalian cells. This work will use ultra-high-throughput circuit construction and measurement platforms to generate large-scale datasets of genetic circuit designs and dynamic single-cell behaviors. These datasets will be used to train multi-scale AI models that learn how genetic circuit designs produce cellular behaviors, enabling researchers to predict, design, and refine mammalian cell programs with increasing precision.

Synthetic biology for next-generation smart-cell therapies. Projects in this area will develop synthetic sensing, signaling, and effector systems that enable human cells to sense local disease environments and deliver therapeutic activity only where and when it is needed. This work will leverage established and emerging therapeutic cell chassis, including T cells, mesenchymal stromal cells, macrophages, and tissue-resident cells, for applications in cancer, inflammatory and autoimmune disease, and tissue regeneration, with the goal of advancing clinically relevant therapeutic programs with TMC collaborators.

Interested applicants should send a CV, a brief statement of research interests and career goals, and contact information for three references to Caleb Bashor at  View email address on nature.com . Informal inquiries are welcome.

Rice University is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We value a diverse and inclusive research environment and encourage applications from candidates of all backgrounds.