Scientific Writer, Life Science; Radial

About Astera:

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.

Radial is a research organization within Astera focused on rethinking life science research at a systems level. The systems that enable how we fund, do, and build upon science have long needed an update. At Radial, we design, fund, and operate programs that tackle foundational scientific problems while simultaneously testing better ways to do science. We're looking for people who are willing to take big risks, build useful things and share their learnings in the open.

Radial is seeking a Scientific Writer to shape and sharpen the scientific content our teams publish — editing research outputs for argument and clarity, drafting blog posts from interviews and raw results, and helping our scientists release work in formats better suited to it than a static PDF. This position reports to the CEO of Radial.

You have a real appetite for creative scholarly communication (e.g. interactive figures, video, executable models) and you're motivated by what happens after publication: work that others can reuse, build on, and openly critique. You'll draft and edit, direct figure and design work, and train researchers at Radial on what good scholarly communications looks like. You'll support Radial’s programs, like Deliverome, OpenADMET, Prism, and the Radial Residency, with audiences ranging from structural biologists and biochemists to gene delivery researchers and prospective residents.

This is a full-time position.

Scientific Writing

• Edit research outputs and scientific publications — both content editing (argument, structure, framing, what the reader needs to know) and copy editing

• Draft and edit blog posts from interviews with scientists, internal documents, and raw results

Publication and release

• Ensure every release meets Astera's Open Science policy — persistent identifiers, open licenses, data in FAIR repositories, runnable code — and maintain the pipeline of upcoming pubs

• Advise on publication strategy and ideal unit of release: help scientists find the smallest independently useful thing they could publish now

Creative and visual communication

• Work with scientists to identify findings that are poorly served by conventional formats, and propose alternatives: interactive figures, web-hosted visualizations, executable code, etc.

• Direct external designers and developers on figures, interactive builds, and demos: write the brief, judge the result, manage the revision loop

• Build templates and tools that make those formats a cheap default rather than a one-off effort

• Refine slide decks for talks, funder meetings, and internal reviews

Documentation support

• Help researchers document the computational methods and algorithms our programs produce: what the method does, what it assumes, what its parameters mean, how it fails, and how a user can tell whether it worked

• Partner with Data Steward on documentation and dataset standards for open-source releases

• PhD in…