Postdoctoral Scientist, Autonomous NMR Characterization

Postdoctoral Scientist, Autonomous NMR Characterization (LSMD)

At Lilly, the work is demanding because patients are waiting. We unite caring with discovery to help make life better for people around the world, knowing that every decision, every detail, and every day matters. Headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana, our over 50,000 employees around the globe take on complex challenges to discover and deliver life‑changing medicines, strengthen how health is understood and managed, and support the communities we serve.

This is hard, urgent, selfless work—but it’s work worth doing. If you’re driven by purpose and ready to bring your best to work that truly matters for patients, we invite you to join us.

The Lilly Small Molecule Discovery (LSMD) group is an organization purpose‑built to create molecules that make life better for people. We focus on using innovative science to unlock novel approaches that can treat people suffering from diseases with poor treatment options. We continually challenge ourselves to deliver molecules that can provide breakthrough efficacy with the highest possible safety margins. We are dedicated to optimizing our mindset, technology, and processes for faster, more nimble execution.

Our success is built on a culture that empowers innovative problem‑solving through open collaboration and individual accountability.
Advanced Molecule Design (AMD) is dedicated to optimizing molecules into strong drug candidates that become breakthrough medicines for patients. AMD brings together core functional areas – medicinal chemistry, synthetic chemistry, analytical chemistry, computational chemistry, and molecular pharmacology – to accelerate the identification and advancement of high‑quality small‑molecule candidates across a breadth of modalities and therapeutic areas.
Discovery Chemistry Technologies (DCT), a key function within AMD, provides critical scientific expertise and technology solutions that support molecule optimization and scale‑up efforts. Within DCT, the Molecular Characterization Team serves as the definitive scientific authority on molecular structure, identity, and other chemistry insights across Lilly’s small‑molecule discovery portfolio. The team primarily applies advanced NMR spectroscopy, mass spectrometry, and complementary analytical techniques to solve the most complex structural elucidation, reaction characterization, and conformational challenges – delivering the molecular‑level insights that enable discovery chemistry teams to make confident, rapid compound progression decisions.

Team members are expected to embrace collaboration, adopt a forward‑thinking and growth‑oriented mindset, and take individual responsibility for their scientific contributions and professional development.

• Keep safety as the top priority, maintaining a strong safety culture in both laboratory and computational work
• Prepare and characterize pharmaceutical compounds and mixtures, acquiring high‑quality 1D and 2D NMR data across a fleet of high‑field spectrometers
• Develop and validate an autonomous NMR characterization platform that optimizes acquisition parameters, selects which experiments to run, and processes data without operator intervention
• Design, set up, and run chemical reactions using modern reaction methodologies, and monitor them in situ by NMR to track reactants, intermediates, products, and byproducts
• Apply and extend modern analytical and computational methods, including 1D/2D NMR, time‑domain signal processing, Bayesian optimization, machine‑learning property prediction, and multivariate chemometrics
• Build reproducible scientific software and closed‑loop instrument automation through the Top Spin Python API and related interfaces, partnering with instrument and software vendors to troubleshoot and extend capabilities
• Collaborate across analytical, medicinal, and process chemistry to translate methods into deployed tools, and communicate results through publications and presentations

• PhD in chemistry, analytical chemistry, computational chemistry, cheminformatics, or a related discipline with all…