Looking for: hardware engineer to join Evolution Suisse team
Evolution Suisse is a team of ETH and UZH students participating in an international competition, where teams from across the world develop and present projects on directed evolution. Last year, our team successfully engineered pathogen resistance in plants, receiving numerous awards and overall gold medals at the final conference.
This year, our team will use phage-assisted continuous evolution (PACE), a method for engineering biomolecules using principles of Darwinian evolution. In PACE, evolutionary pressure is exercised on a bacteriophage to continuously propagate by infecting new bacteria. Both the phage and bacteria are genetically engineered to link phage fitness to the trait-of-interest. The system has been successfully applied to engineer CRISPR proteins, proteases, binders etc. Read more here.
As a hardware engineer, you will work on developing a PACE reactor. It is a crucial component of the system that has to continuously monitor and maintain both bacterial and phage populations, as well as automatically collect data for downstream analysis. Similar efforts have been done here and here.
Your opportunity:
Work at the intersection between hardware and biology
Work in a team of highly motivated interdisciplinary students
Apply your skills in a real-world project
Present your work at an international conference
Your contribution
experience with Arduino & Raspberry Pi projects
Development of electrical circuits (controlling sensors, DC and stepper motors), sourcing parts and assembling PCBs.
Experience in CAD (ideally Fusion 360 or similar)
ideally: experience with Altium Designer or similar
Timeline of the project is March-September 2024, with most of the reactor work happening in the spring. Hours are flexible, and work is task-based.
Apply by sending your CV to idec@studentbiolab.ch