Director, Analytical Chemistry

Overview

The Role Moderna is seeking a Director, Analytical Chemistry to provide scientific, strategic, and organizational leadership for discovery-stage analytical chemistry activities supporting mRNA-lipid nanoparticle (LNP) research across a diverse portfolio of nucleic acid medicines. This leader will define and advance analytical strategies that enable rapid design-make-test-learn cycles across novel ionizable lipids, polymers, excipients, payloads, formulations, and delivery systems used in mRNA-LNP therapeutics and vaccines.

The successful candidate will serve as a senior analytical partner to medicinal chemistry, computational chemistry, formulation, delivery sciences, platform biology, and selected development functions to accelerate molecular design, analytical decision-making, and candidate progression. The individual will guide analytical approaches spanning small molecules, polymers and lipid characterization, impurity profiling, structure elucidation, orthogonal physicochemical characterization, and fit-for-purpose evaluation of RNA, lipid, and nanoparticle attributes in support of discovery and early development objectives.

Building Moderna's technical model for analytical leadership, this role will provide strategic oversight of method development, method qualification and transfer where appropriate, characterization, impurity identification, and analytical control strategy concepts relevant to discovery and translational research. The leader will help define decision-quality analytical packages, ensure alignment of analytical deliverables with program milestones, and provide technical guidance and oversight to both internal teams and external CRO/CDMO partners.

This position requires deep expertise in modern analytical chemistry and a strong ability to translate complex data into actionable scientific decisions. The ideal candidate will combine technical depth in separation science, characterization, and structure elucidation with proven leadership experience, sound scientific judgment, and the ability to build productive partnerships across internal teams and external collaborators. Experience supporting transitions from discovery through IND-enabling or early clinical development is strongly valued.

Experience with high-throughput methodologies is highly desirable, and familiarity with artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques is considered a strong plus.

This role will be in Cambridge, MA.

• Lead and develop a high-performing team of analytical scientists and, depending on organizational design, matrix-lead additional scientists across analytical chemistry, characterization, and platform functions supporting discovery-stage mRNA-LNP research.
• Set the analytical chemistry vision and strategy for discovery-stage mRNA-LNP programs, ensuring fit-for-purpose analytical capabilities are available to support lipid design, payload evaluation, formulation screening, and candidate advancement.
• Serve as the senior analytical partner to medicinal chemistry teams by enabling structure confirmation, purity and impurity profiling, route support, reference standard strategy, and rapid troubleshooting for novel lipids and related small molecules.
• Partner closely with computational chemistry and data science teams to translate molecular design hypotheses into analytical learning plans, generate data sets that improve structure-property understanding, and inform iterative design of ionizable lipids and related delivery materials.
• Collaborate with formulation and delivery sciences teams to establish robust analytical workflows for screening and characterizing LNP systems, including support for lipid composition assessment, encapsulation-related analytics, degradation pathways, and physicochemical attribute characterization.
• Guide fit-for-purpose analytical method development, optimization, qualification, transfer, and lifecycle management across chromatography, mass spectrometry, spectroscopy, and orthogonal characterization platforms.
• Provide scientific leadership in small molecule and lipid structure elucidation, impurity identification, forced degradation or stress…