Research Assistant - Structural Bioinformatics

Astera is a private foundation on a mission to steer science and technology toward an abundant 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 dramatically accelerate innovation. This inflection point provides an unparalleled opportunity to fundamentally rethink the institutions, systems, and tools that drive scientific progress.

Unlike traditional non-profit research organizations, projects supported by Astera operate like high-velocity startups, allowing us to focus on ambitious goals, match structure to problem, and attract strong technical talent and leadership. You can read more about our mission, vision, and programming here.

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.

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  Maintain and run bioinformatic pipelines for structural data processing, curation, and quality control.

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  Support development and benchmarking of validation metrics against experimental datasets.

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  Assist with data deposition, formatting, and documentation to meet community data standards.

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  Help prepare datasets, figures, and summaries for publications, reports, and presentations.

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  Coordinate with Scientists and engineers on routine data management tasks and troubleshooting.

• 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.