Research Assistant II

At Boston Children’s Hospital, the quality of our care – and our inclusive hospital working environment – lies in the diversity of our people. With patients from local communities and 160 countries around the world, we’re committed to reflecting the spectrum of their cultures, while opening doors of opportunity for our team. Here, different talents pursue common goals. Voices are heard and ideas are shared. Join us, and discover how your unique contributions can change lives. Yours included. Lab Summary: Michael Farzan’s laboratory at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School engineers lymphocytes – B cells and T cells – for a range of scientific and translational goals. For example, this technology allows us to use murine germinal centers to select potent and highly bioavailable human antibodies. It also provides us useful animal models to evaluate and improve vaccines, as well as a new way to address unanswered questions in lymphocyte-cell biology and adaptive immunity. The chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) B cells and CD4-positive CAR T cells so generated can themselves be conceived of as a therapy for many disease states including HIV infection. Because our engineered B cells affinity mature, we apply them to our efforts to predict uniquely human responses to candidate vaccines in mice and non-human primates. This tool is critical for our parallel efforts to develop novel antigens that elicit antibodies in humans that protect from HIV-1 infection. Finally, we seek to develop better genome editing and gene delivery tools that will improve the quality and safety of our engineered lymphocytes.