Research Technician position needed for the Dr Ait ALi lab within Ophthalmology Department.

Responsibilities include:

• Bibliographic research and experimental design to validate scientific hypothesis

• General laboratory organization: writing protocols, inventories, purchases, safety documentation,

• Design and implementation of experimental workflows. Troubleshooting of different technical and biological parameters over multi-day experiments. Validation of methods and design of experimental condition comparisons.

• Learning a method to optimize laboratory techniques.

• General knowledge about antibody selection, gene target selection, cell culture in the scale of tens to hundred million cells for quantitative profiling experiments, cell harvest, lysis, protein extraction, solubilization, fractionation and protein biochemistry.

• General laboratory organization: writing protocols, inventories, purchases, safety documentation

• Laboratory techniques: competent cells, agar plates, plasmid preparation, plaque assay.

• Bacteriophage detection, and preparation of aliquots, common buffers and bacterial grow media.

• cell line maintenance, passaging, cryostorage, and harvesting; aliquot preparation, mycoplasma test.

• Model organism: mouse (Mus musculus), retina extraction and embedding in OCT compound, ear punching and tailing of mice. Dissection of organs and cryostorage. Injections (intracardiac, subcutaneous, intraperitoneal, retroorbital), anesthesia, euthanasia, PCR for genotyping.

• Western blot, BCA assay, Ca measurement assay.

• Protein extraction from cells, quantification, trypsin digestion.

• Nucleic acids extraction, purification and quantification, PCR, cDNA synthesis, RT-PCR.

• Software/Databases Excel, Image J, NCBI, Ensemble, Primer 3, Prism, Photoshop. Adobe Illustrator, snapgene.

Bachelor's degree preferred, will accept prior lab experience in lieu of.

The University of Pittsburgh is an equal opportunity employer / disability / veteran.