Principal Scientist, Upstream Development

We are seeking a highly motivated and experienced individual to join our Upstream Development Department as a Principal Scientist. In this role, the successful candidate will work closely with scientists in the Upstream Development Department to develop and refine technical strategy related to next generation processing for assets in early- and late-stage clinical development.

Job Responsibilities

• Leading biologic upstream process development for first-in-human and commercial processes by efficiently developing high yield, robust and scalable cell culture processes.
• Providing technical direction for process development, characterization, commercialization, and regulatory filing activities to ensure a smooth and clear path to successful PPQs and BLAs for our company pipeline.
• Advancing upstream platform process technical strategy and championing creative process improvement initiatives.
• Initiating new collaborations to assess new technologies and industry strategies with relevance to our Company.
• Collaborating with academia, industry partners, and vendors to drive development, innovation and adoption of new process technologies with broad impact to projects or platform.
• Keeping up to date with the external patent and literature environment; actively presents and publishes externally and pursues patenting strategies.
• Supervising, coaching and educating junior scientists.

Minimum Education Required

Ph.D. with 8+ years of industry experience, Master with 10+ years industry experience, bachelor's with 14+ years industry in Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering, Biochemistry or a related field.

Required Experience and Skills

• Proven record of accomplishments in upstream process and technology development with a strong scientific publication and presentation track record.
• Experience in CHO fed-batch cell culture and a working understanding of downstream & analytics.
• Understanding and hands-on experience on cell culture bioreactors including microbioreactors, bench-scale and pilot-scale bioreactors, and scaleup/tech transfer activities.
• Working knowledge of cell culture media, CHO cell biology and metabolism, DOE statistics and computational fluid dynamics.
• Ability to direct the planning, execution, analysis, and documentation of all stages of cell culture process development.
• Ability to work in a matrixed team environment and collaborate with both internal and external partners including vendors.
• Knowledge of biologics CMC development cycle.
• Demonstrated ability for taking initiative, creativity, and innovation in problem solving.
• Demonstrated ability to develop staff to maximize utilization of talent and actively guides career development; builds strong and collaborative teams.

Preferred Experience and Skills

• Experience with state-of-the-art cell culture processes including intensified inoculum and perfusion process development.
• Experience with early- and late-stage commercial process development, technology transfer, scale-down model qualification and process characterization.
• Experience with high throughput microbioreactor systems, and advanced in situ analytics for process monitoring and control.
• Expertise in media development, media/solution chemistry.
• Background in data science approaches related to cell culture and predictive modeling e.g., metabolic flux analysis (MFA), omics, machine learning; experience integrating PAT efforts and computational fluid dynamics (CFD).
• Experience leading cross functional, program development teams.