Senior Manager - Spatial Biology

Senior Manager, Large Format Spatial Biology

The mission of the Allen Institute is to unlock the complexities of bioscience and advance our knowledge to improve human health. Using an open science, multi‑scale, team‑oriented approach, the Allen Institute focuses on accelerating foundational research, developing standards and models, and cultivating new ideas to make a broad, transformational impact on science.

The Allen Institute is launching a new moonshot initiative on human brain health and disease. This initiative aims to dramatically accelerate our understanding of human brain structure and function, identify the molecular, cellular and circuit basis of disease progression, and pioneer new therapeutic strategies targeting vulnerable and affected cell types. Our mission focuses on taking a human‑centric approach to understanding and treating disease, combining a large‑scale open science discovery approach across multiple diseases, AI‑based disease modeling, and translational programs in specific diseases to move from discovery to clinical application.

We aim to make transformational change in understanding and treating brain disorders, the biggest health challenge of our time.

Recent advances in spatial molecular analyses of brain tissues with high‑information‑content transcriptomic, proteomic and connectomic methods are rapidly transforming how we can understand brain structure and function in health and disease, accelerated by the recent commercialization of spatial platforms. Application to important areas of human neurobiology and neurobiology of disease is now possible, albeit with the need for technical innovation to scale to large format needed to understand brain‑wide phenotypes of human brain structure and function.

We are seeking an outstanding individual to lead a large format spatial biology core, to collaborate with internal and external partners to bring in new technologies, optimize them for application to human brain tissues, and manage a core facility to deliver high‑throughput datasets as part of coordinated large‑scale projects. This individual should have experience in imaging core management, and is highly motivated to support creation of an imaging core to take on the specific challenges of large‑format imaging of large human brain specimens.

This role will also foster innovation on new assays and technologies and actively participate in scientific programs to accelerate discovery and translation in brain disorders. The successful candidate will have direct expertise in spatial methods and experience running core facilities.

• Develop, implement and maintain custom and commercially‑available solutions to assess gene expression in large format tissue sections, especially but not limited to human brain
• Daily, direct supervision and management of a team responsible for generating high quality spatial transcriptomic data and/or building the processes for data acquisition, quality control and transfer to the cloud
• Participate in complex, multi‑team collaborative projects on human brain healthy and diseased brain spatial analyses
• Manage a high throughput core, including day‑to‑day operations, staffing, scheduling, budgeting, and financial governance
• Seek and evaluate new cutting‑edge techniques in related areas
• Participate in new technology development efforts
• Support and drive multiple projects in parallel, focusing on both exploratory technology development projects as well as large scale data generation for established projects and collaborations with the scientific community
• Collaborate across teams within the Allen Institute to ensure accuracy and efficiency in the relevant data generation pipelines, including advising teams on upstream specimen generation, handling and processing, and downstream data analysis
• Present at internal scientific meetings and scientific conferences
• Contribute to manuscripts and grant applications

Note:

Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions. This description reflects management’s assignment of essential functions; it does not proscribe or restrict the tasks that…