Senior Scientist, Ensemble–Function Mapping

About the role

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:

The Astera Institute is seeking a full-time Senior Scientist, Ensemble–Function Mapping to lead a computational team that turns conformational ensembles into predictions of protein function. This growing team will develop methods that connect ensembles to allosteric coupling, catalytic efficiency, and binding specificity, and build the platforms and pipelines that test which structural data matter most. The goal is a landmark finding that links ensembles to function. This position reports to the Scientific Program Director.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

- Lead Prism's research connecting conformational ensembles to function. Direct the scientific vision to predict and explain allosteric coupling, catalytic efficiency, and binding specificity, and drive that work toward high-impact findings.