ABOUT ASTERA:
Astera is a private foundation on a mission to steer science and technology toward a better 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 accelerate innovation. This inflection point provides an unparalleled opportunity to fundamentally rethink the institutions, systems, and tools that drive progress. We have committed a $3.5B endowment to that work and fit the form of our support to the function it serves: grants, investments, and in-house research programs. We accept meaningful risk in the research we back and expect some of it to fail because transformative ideas are rarely the ones already proven. Our projects, and the foundation itself, operate like high-velocity startups, with a high performance bar and competitive compensation to match. We are searching for leaders who are compelled by the challenge of driving high-impact change in the way science is funded, conducted, and communicated. You can read more about our mission, vision, and programming at astera.org/vision http://astera.org/vision.
ABOUT PRISM:
Prism is making protein motion measurable, predictable, and actionable. Proteins are always moving, and that movement drives their function: binding, catalysis, allostery, selectivity, and mutational effects all emerge from conformational ensembles, the distribution of states a protein moves between. Yet most structural data rests on static snapshots that capture form, not function, because motion has been hard to measure and interpret. As a result, we lack critical levers to correct proteins in disease and engineer them for new purposes. Prism is building open, usable tools, methods, and infrastructure to study protein dynamics from experimental data, and applying them to pressing biological questions, including binding affinity, enzyme engineering, and explaining pathogenic variants. Prism sits with Radial, Astera’s Life Sciences Division.
ABOUT RADIAL:
Radial is Astera's life sciences division. We tackle foundational problems in biology while simultaneously prototyping better ways to fund, organize, and share research. Radial builds programs in-house, funds external teams, and designs partnerships in service of public-good science.
POSITION SUMMARY:
Prism is seeking a full-time Senior Scientist, Structural Data Representation to lead how Prism's conformational ensemble models are encoded, organized into databases, and connected to the tools the rest of the field uses. This includes visualization, machine learning models, and other computational pipelines. You will lead a small Prism team and partner with external developer communities to make ensemble data a standard part of structural biology. This position reports to the Scientific Program Director.
RESPONSIBILITIES:
- Lead and mentor a team of 2–3 scientists and software engineers, setting priorities and keeping execution moving as you take Prism's ensemble models from internal research to broad adoption across the field.
- Work with the Scientific Program Director to determine strategy and prioritization of approaches and science within your team.
- Partner with Prism's modeling and ensemble-functional team, alongside the Scientific Program Director, to ensure cohesion across the project, including making sure data representation choices serve both what models produce and what downstream functional analyses need.
- Design, test, and deploy encoding models and schemas for conformational ensembles.
- Direct the development of databases to connect dynamic ensemble models for data sharing and downstream use, including visualization tools.
- Work with external partners such as the PDB and tool developers in the visualization, ML, and computational chemistry space in order to build bridges between work within Prism and external partners.
- Partner with the teams behind widely used open-source structural…