I.About Us
The Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology (SIAT) was jointly established by CAS, the Shenzhen municipal government and the Chinese University of Hong Kong in February 2006. With 8 institutes and numerous other labs and facilities, SIAT aims to enhance the innovative capacity of the equipment manufacturing and service industries in the Guangdong-Hong Kong region, promote the development of emerging industries possessing their own proprietary intellectual property, and become a world-class industrial research institute.

The Center for Synthetic Biochemistry (CSB) in the Shenzhen Institutes for Advanced Technology is a new center dedicated to the development of synthetic biochemistry that can be used to produce nearly any organic molecule. The CSB is led by Professor Jay Keasling, one of the leaders in the fields of synthetic biology and metabolic engineering, and is part of the newly created Institute for Synthetic Biology (iSynBio). 

The CSB will have a team of a dozen principle investigators in plant biology, microbial biology (including microbiomes), bioinformatics, in vitro biology, synthetic biology, systems biology, metabolic engineering, and analytical chemistry who will be devoted to discovering new natural biochemistry in living systems (plants, microorganisms, animals, insects), developing new enzymes to catalyze unnatural biochemistry, and engineering microorganisms, microbial communities, plants and in vitro systems to produce pharmaceuticals, commodity and specialty chemicals, materials, and biofuels. It is envisioned that each PI will have a team of approximately 20 researchers (post-doctoral fellows, graduate students, research assistants) and that PIs will collaborate on large projects that could not be accomplished by a single laboratory. 

II.Vacancies Available
1.Professor of Plant Natural Products
2.Professor of Microbial Natural Products
3.Professor of In Vitro Biology
4.Professor of Microbiome Engineering
5.Professor of Metabolic Engineering
6.Professor of Enzyme Engineering
7.Professor of Bioinformatics and Retrobiosynthesis
8.Professor of Custom-Made Microbes
9.Professor of Metabolic Pathway and Whole-Cell Modeling
10.Professor of Bioprocess Engineering and Commercialization
11.Director of Analytical and High-Throughput Biochemistry
All positions are open at assistant professor, associate professor, and full professor level.

III.Job Descriptions
1.Professor of Plant Natural Products
Job descriptions: 
a.Lead a team of scientists that will identify interesting and important plant natural products and use the latest advances in bioinformatics, high throughput biology, and synthetic biology to identify and characterize the enzymes in those pathways.
b.Work with microbial synthetic biologists to refactor those pathways into industrial microorganisms for the production of the target molecules.
Job requirements:
a.Have a PhD and post-doctoral work in plant biology, biochemistry or equivalent fields and demonstrated expertise (through publications and patents) in plant natural products.
b.Priority to a resume that qualifies him/her for a Thousand Talents Plan award.

2.Professor of Microbial Natural Products
Job descriptions: 
a.Lead a team of scientists that will identify interesting and important microbially-produced natural products and use the latest advances in bioinformatics, high throughput biology, and synthetic biology to identify and characterize the enzymes in those pathways. 
b.Work with microbial synthetic biologists to refactor those pathways into industrial microorganisms for the production of the target molecules. 
Job requirements:
a.Have a PhD and post-doctoral work in microbiology, biochemistry or equivalent fields and demonstrated expertise (through publications and patents) in microbial natural products.
b.Priority to a resume that qualifies him/her for a Thousand Talents Plan award.

3.Professor of In Vitro Biology
Job descriptions: 
a.Lead a team of scientists that will develop in vitro transcription-translation-reaction systems for reconstituting natural and unnatural biosynthetic pathways, both for scientific exploration and eventually for production of target molecules. 
b.Work with CSB teams that are focused on discovering new biosynthetic pathways in plants and microorganisms and with microbial synthetic biologists who are refactoring pathways into industrial microorganisms.
Job requirements:
a.Have a PhD and post-doctoral work in biochemistry or equivalent fields and demonstrated expertise (through publications and patents) in in vitro biology.
b.Priority to a resume that qualifies him/her for a Thousand Talents Plan award.

4.Professor of Microbiome Engineering
Job descriptions: 
a.Lead a team of scientists that will identify key natural (or unnatural) products to deliver to the host (plant, animal, human), identify appropriate members of microbial communities to engineer, develop tools to engineer the microbiome constituent(s) and engineer it with pathways that produce the desired product.
b.Work with CSB research groups that focus on plant and/or microbial natural products to refactor those pathways into the target microbiome constituent for the production of the target molecules.
c.Collaborate with experts in human, animal or plant biology outside the CSB to examine the impact of the engineered microbiome on the health of the higher order system.
Job requirements:
a.Have extensive experience working with, studying and engineering microbiome constituents, particularly microorganisms that do not have good transformation systems.
b.Have a PhD and post-doctoral work in microbiology, biochemistry or equivalent fields and demonstrated expertise (through publications and patents) in microbial natural products.
c.Priority to a resume that qualifies him/her for a Thousand Talents Plan award.

5.Professor of Metabolic Engineering
Job descriptions: 
a.Lead a team of scientists that will develop efficient metabolic pathways to transform renewable sources of energy and carbon (including sunlight and gaseous feedstocks) into valuable products. In particular, the CSB is interested in developing highly efficient metabolic pathways to convert waste gas streams into valuable products.
b.Work with the microbial engineering teams, the plant and microbial natural products teams, the microbiome engineering team and the custom-made microbe team to develop highly efficient metabolic pathways to a variety of candidate products.
Job requirements:
a.Have a strong background in metabolic pathway design and engineering in microorganisms.
b.Have a PhD and post-doctoral work in microbiology, biochemistry or equivalent fields and demonstrated expertise (through publications and patents) in metabolic engineering.
c.Priority to a resume that qualifies him/her for a Thousand Talents Plan award.

6.Professor of Enzyme Engineering
Job descriptions: 
a.Lead a team of scientists that will develop new enzymes for chemical reactions for which enzymes do not exist or for reaction conditions that existing enzymes cannot tolerate.  
b.Work extensively with microbial and metabolic engineering teams as well as the in vitro biology and custom-made microbe teams to develop enzymes for new metabolic pathways, for new microbial chassis, and in vitro catalysis.
Job requirements:
a.Have a strong background in computational enzyme design and/or enzyme evolution and demonstrated experience in engineering enzymes for practical application.
b.Have a PhD and post-doctoral work in biochemistry, bioengineering, chemistry, chemical engineering, or equivalent fields and demonstrated expertise (through publications and patents) in enzyme engineering.
c.Priority to a resume that qualifies him/her for a Thousand Talents Plan award.

7.Professor of Bioinformatics and Retrobiosynthesis
Job descriptions: 
a.Lead a team of scientists that will develop computation methods and software that will allow CSB teams to elucidate natural biosynthetic pathways, construct new biochemical pathways, and aid in the design and construction of custom-made microbes.  
b.Work extensively with all of the research teams of the CSB 
Job requirements:
a.Have extensive experience in bioinformatics of microbial and plant secondary metabolic pathways and biochemical informatics as well as in software design.
b.Have a PhD and post-doctoral work in biochemistry, bioengineering, chemistry, chemical engineering, or equivalent fields and demonstrated expertise (through publications and patents) in enzyme engineering.
c.Priority to a resume that qualifies him/her for a Thousand Talents Plan award.

8.Professor of Custom-Made Microbes
Job descriptions: 
a.Lead a team of scientists that will design and construct custom-made microbes for chemical synthesis, including cells to be used in bioreactors and cells to be constituents of microbiomes.
b.Work with the Metabolic Pathway and Whole Cell Modeling team, the Bioinformatics and Retrobiosynthesis team, and with the Genome-Write Center (also in the Institute for Synthetic Biology) to design and build custom-made microbes and with several other teams in the CSB to apply the custom-made microbes to produce valuable products.
Job requirements:
a.Have experience in chromosome engineering, cell wall-membrane engineering, and/or metabolic pathway refactoring.
b.Have a PhD and post-doctoral work in bioengineering, microbiology, biochemistry or equivalent fields and demonstrated expertise (through publications and patents) in designing cells.
c.Priority to a resume that qualifies him/her for a Thousand Talents Plan award.

9.Professor of Metabolic Pathway and Whole-Cell Modeling
Job descriptions: 
a.Lead a team of scientists that will develop mathematically models and computer simulations of metabolic pathways and whole cells for the purpose of redesigning natural microbial chassis and for designing custom-made microbial chassis for production of valuable products.
b.Work with all CSB research groups but particularly the Custom-Made Microbe group so that the two research groups can design, construct and optimize custom-made microbes.
Job requirements:
a.Have extensive experience in modeling and simulating gene expression, enzyme activities, metabolic pathways, and cell function as well as software design and implementation. Have experience in developing methods for monitoring gene expression and metabolism and integrating those measurements into models.
b.Have a PhD and post-doctoral work in microbiology, biochemistry or equivalent fields and demonstrated expertise (through publications and patents) in metabolic and whole-cell modeling. 
c.Priority to a resume that qualifies him/her for a Thousand Talents Plan award.

10.Professor of Bioprocess Engineering and Commercialization
Job descriptions: 
a.Lead a team of scientists/engineers that will scale-up processes developed by CSB research teams and prepare them for commercialization.
b.Work with all CSB research groups to identify those processes most amenable to commercialization and then work with the originating scientific team to optimize the organism and process and help to license the technology or develop start-ups. 
Job requirements:
a.Have extensive experience in engineering and optimizing microorganisms for industrial chemical production processes.
b.Have a PhD in chemical engineering, bioengineering, or equivalent fields and demonstrated expertise (through publications and patents) in bioprocess engineering.
c.Priority to a resume that qualifies him/her for a Thousand Talents Plan award.

11.Director of Analytical and High-Throughput Biochemistry
Job descriptions: 
a.Lead a team of scientists that develop high throughput biochemical assays for various processes and to analyze engineered microorganisms using transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics and any number of other techniques.
b.Work with all CSB research groups to speed sample analysis, increase information content, and analyze the resulting data.
Job requirements:
a.Have extensive experience in analytical chemistry as applied to biological systems.
b.Have a PhD in analytical chemistry, or equivalent fields and demonstrated expertise (through publications and patents) in metabolomics, proteomics, automated analytics, etc. A research program is optional. 

IV.Benefits
We offer internationally competitive salaries and benefits，ample start-up resources for equipment and personnel. Qualified candidates for Thousand Talent Program, the Peacock Program or other talent programs will receive additional support from the central and municipal governments.

V.Documents for Application
1.Curriculum vitae, including full publication list
2.Research interests and a statement of research plan
3.Copies of three representative publications
4.Three reference letters
Application will be considered until the position is filled. All documents will be treated confidentially.

VI.Contact Information
Email: keasling@siat.ac.cn