Postdoctoral Fellow

Salary for this Role:

From £47,500 with benefits, subject to skills and experience.

Postdoctoral Fellow

Caroline Hill

30/Sept/ GMT

Job Title: Postdoctoral Fellow – Hill lab

Reporting to: Caroline Hill, Head of Developmental Signalling Laboratory

Working pattern :
This is a full-time, fixed term (4 years) position on Crick terms and conditions of employment

Salary: From £47,500 with benefits, subject to skills and experience

Final date to receive applications: 30th of September 2026 m

The Francis Crick Institute is Europe’s largest biomedical research institute under one roof. Our world‑class scientists and staff collaborate on vital research to help prevent, diagnose and treat illnesses such as cancer, heart disease, infectious diseases and neurodegenerative conditions.

The Crick is a place for collaboration, innovation and exploration across many disciplines. A space where the brightest minds can pursue big and bold ideas and discover answers to crucial scientific questions. We support them in a dynamic environment which fosters excellence with state‑of‑the‑art infrastructure, cutting‑edge facilities, and a creative and curious culture. We’ve removed traditional boundaries of departments, divisions and disciplines and instead have an open approach that supports every researcher.

This gives us the freedom to take risks and carry out high-quality, pioneering research. Creating a space for discovery without boundaries helps us to turn our science into benefits for human health and the economy.

The Developmental Signalling Laboratory headed by Caroline Hill focuses on cell signalling in early vertebrate development and disease. Our work seeks to understand how TGF‑b family signalling pathways function normally in early vertebrate development and in adult untransformed cells, and how these signalling pathways are perturbed in disease, in particular in cancer and the Marfan‑related syndromes.

to find out more about the Hill Lab

We are looking for a highly motivated postdoc with proven research abilities and excellent publication record to work on structural projects using Cryo‑EM and crystallography to gain mechanistic insights into TGF-β family signalling in health and disease.

We have recently been studying the effects of mutations in the transcriptional repressor SKI that occur in the Marfan‑related disorder, Shprintzen‑Goldberg syndrome. SKI normally binds with SMAD4 (one of the SMADs that acts downstream of TGF-β family ligands) to TGF-β and activin response elements in the absence of signalling to repress transcription. It is then rapidly degraded upon TGF-β/activin signalling as a result of forming a complex with activated SMADs (induced downstream of TGF-β/activin) and the E3 ubiquitin ligase RNF
111 (also called Arkadia). This frees up the TGF-β/activin response elements for activated SMAD complexes to bind to drive transcription. We have shown that SKI containing the point mutations that occur in Shprintzen‑Goldberg syndrome is not degraded and in this context, TGF-β/activin transcriptional responses are inhibited.

We have very recently solved the structure of a complex comprising SKI–phosphorylated SMAD2–SMAD4, that sheds light on the effect of the SKI mutations on SKI–SMAD binding. One of the main ambitions of this new project is to understand now using structural, biochemical and biophysical approaches, how this complex is recognised by RNF
111 for proteosomal degradation. We also want to understand how the full length activated SMAD complexes bind at the TGF-β/activin-responsive elements with cooperating transcription factors to activate transcription. We are investigating this for wild type SMADs, but also in the context of another disease, Myhre syndrome, where SMAD4 contains an activating mutation.

Postdoctoral Fellows at the Crick lead their own projects, contribute to other projects on a collaborative basis (both in the lab and with external collaborators) and may guide PhD students in their research. The ability to work in a team is essential.

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