Postdoctoral Position in Immunology

Muscle loss due to trauma, tumor resection or congenital malformation can be devastating, and tissue engineering approaches to skeletal muscle regeneration have met with limited success. One urgent and underappreciated hurdle is the poor survival rate of implanted cells, and positions are available to study immune mechanisms involved in early post-transplant injury that contribute to engineered tissue rejection. An emphasis will be on the role of the complement system, and studies will be focused on mouse models of scaffold-free tissue engineered cell transplantation. At least some experience with microsurgical techniques is desired. At a basic level, the project will involve post-surgical analysis of transplanted tissues, including histology and immune-microscopy, analysis of immune response in transplant recipients, including immune cell analysis and molecular analytical techniques, and investigation of therapeutic paradigms with novel complement inhibitory constructs.