Research Associate / Senior Research Associate

About the role

The Research Associate / Senior Research Associate position at CytoHub Inc. is located in San Diego, CA. This role is part of the Discovery & Diagnostics Division and involves developing, producing, characterizing, and scaling human iPSC-derived tissue platforms, particularly focusing on CardioVive™, a human mini-heart system for cardiac pharmacology, cardiotoxicity, and cardiovascular disease modeling.

Responsibilities

• Maintain human iPSC lines and perform directed differentiation into relevant lineages.
• Assemble and characterize organoids and other 3D tissue systems, optimizing protocols for reproducibility and batch-to-batch consistency.
• Scale tissue manufacturing by selecting and implementing automation and bioreactor technologies suited to the production stage.
• Develop and run high-throughput screening campaigns on iPSC-derived models in microplate formats (96-well and higher density).
• Operate, program, and integrate automated liquid handlers and robotic platforms into automated assay and culture workflows.
• Contribute to automation planning for tissue manufacturing and assay scale-up, including process mapping and transfer of manual methods to automated platforms.
• Run functional and phenotypic assays across relevant readout modalities.
• Perform imaging-based and molecular characterization of cellular and tissue samples.
• Analyze and report assay outputs in a structured, reproducible manner.
• Apply iPSC-derived models to disease phenotyping, compound testing, and mechanism-of-action studies across therapeutic areas.
• Support safety, toxicity, pharmacology, and diagnostic assay workflows for internal and partner programs.
• Contribute to assay qualification and platform validation activities.
• Generate structured, metadata-rich datasets ready for downstream computational use.
• Partner with computational scientists on iterative design-build-test-learn cycles.
• Document and team collaboration.

Requirements

• BSc or MSc in a relevant life sciences or bioengineering field, with 3+ years of hands-on lab experience in academia, biotech, or pharma.
• Hands-on experience with human iPSC culture, 3D tissue or organoid systems, and standard imaging, flow, and molecular assays.
• Strong grasp of experimental design, documentation, and reproducibility, with comfort generating structured datasets for downstream computational use.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with cardiac or CNS iPSC-derived models (organoids, assembloids, microtissues, or engineered tissues).
• Functional and live-cell assay platforms (MEA, patch clamp, calcium imaging, contractility, or high-content imaging).
• Bioreactor or scaled 3D culture systems (vertical-wheel, stirred-tank, suspension, or perfusion) for organoid or cell-therapy manufacturing.
• scRNA-seq sample prep, omics workflows, or multimodal biological datasets.
• Drug discovery, safety pharmacology, toxicology, disease modeling, or mechanism-of-action studies.
• Automated liquid handling, lab robotics, and scheduling software for integrated assay and culture workflows.
• Scripting, statistics, image analysis, or ELN/LIMS tools.