Associate Director, Protein Sciences; Billerica MA)

Position: Associate Director, Protein Sciences (Billerica MA)
Work Your Magic with us! Start your next chapter and join EMD Serono.

Ready to explore, break barriers, and discover more? We know you’ve got big plans – so do we! Our colleagues across the globe love innovating with science and technology to enrich people’s lives with our solutions in Healthcare, Life Science, and Electronics. Together, we dream big and are passionate about caring for our rich mix of people, customers, patients, and planet.

That's why we are always looking for curious minds that see themselves imagining the unimaginable with us.  United As One for Patients, our purpose in Healthcare is to help create, improve and prolong lives. We develop medicines, intelligent devices and innovative technologies in therapeutic areas such as Oncology, Neurology and Fertility. Our teams work together across 6 continents with passion and relentless curiosity in order to help patients at every stage of life.

Joining our Healthcare team is becoming part of a diverse, inclusive and flexible working culture, presenting great opportunities for personal development and career advancement across the globe.

The Associate Director, Protein Sciences will lead the design, development, expression, purification, and biophysical characterization of challenging protein targets that support discovery and development programs. This role requires deep expertise in membrane proteins, intracellular proteins, receptor fusions, and other difficult-to-express or difficult-to-purify constructs, together with the scientific judgment to select and optimize fit-for-purpose expression and purification strategies.

The successful candidate will combine hands-on technical depth with strong people leadership, cross-functional collaboration, and the ability to translate complex protein-science challenges into practical, high-quality solutions.

Key responsibilities

Lead protein-science strategies for membrane proteins, intracellular proteins, receptor fusions, and other complex or challenging targets.

Design and optimize expression and purification workflows across diverse platforms, including mammalian, insect, bacterial, yeast, and cell-free expression systems.

Develop scalable approaches for proteins with low expression, poor solubility, instability, aggregation, proteolytic sensitivity, or challenging post-translational requirements.

Guide construct design, tag selection, buffer optimization, detergent and lipid screening, stabilization strategies, and formulation development.

Establish and implement robust purification workflows, including affinity, ion-exchange, hydrophobic-interaction, size-exclusion, and other appropriate chromatographic methods.

Plan and interpret protein-characterization studies to assess identity, purity, homogeneity, oligomeric state, folding, stability, and functional integrity.

Apply and oversee advanced analytical techniques, including:

Surface plasmon resonance (SPR) and related interaction analyses

Intact-mass spectrometry

Top-down and bottom-up mass spectrometry

Size-exclusion chromatography with multi-angle light scattering (SEC-MALS)
Complementary biophysical and biochemical methods as appropriate

Define analytical strategies for difficult-to-purify proteins and make evidence-based recommendations on construct, process, and assay selection.

Troubleshoot complex protein-expression, purification, and characterization problems and communicate clear recommendations to project teams and leadership.

Lead or contribute to technical strategy, experimental planning, data review, milestone planning, and scientific decision-making across multidisciplinary teams.

Build strong partnerships with groups such as structural biology, biophysics, biochemistry, assay development, analytical sciences, and project or…