Postdoctoral research assistant; PDRA), Ternary amorphous solid dispersion screening – Early Pr

Postdoctoral research assistant (PDRA), Ternary amorphous solid dispersion screening – Early Product Development and Manufacturing - 24 month fixed term contract

Location:
Macclesfield, UK

Competitive salary and benefits

Are you excited to push formulation science into new territory and see your work directly influence how we develop medicines for patients with unmet need? In this postdoctoral role, you will build and validate screening protocols for ternary amorphous solid dispersions that help us choose the right formulation, faster, for poorly soluble drugs.

You will join a highly collaborative team that blends lab science with automation and digital capabilities to turn sophisticated data into clear decisions. From day one, you will shape workflows that our project teams can trust  you envision your experiments, code and data models becoming the standard way we progress molecules through early development?

Accountabilities:

• Ternary ASD Screening Strategy:
  Build, implement and refine a broad compositional screening strategy for ternary amorphous solid dispersions, translating scientific hypotheses into practical, scale-aware experiments.

• Workflow Design and Validation:
  Build robust, repeatable workflows that enable rapid selection of optimal formulations for poorly soluble drugs, with clear decision criteria and acceptance thresholds.

• Data Architecture and Knowledge Management:
  Partner with digital colleagues to structure data capture, metadata standards and searchable records that make insights reusable across programs.

• Automation Enablement:
  Implement and optimize automation to increase efficiency, reproducibility and safety; reduce manual steps and cycle time across screening and characterization.

• Digitisation and Analytics:
  Deliver digitisation solutions and analytical pipelines that increase productivity, including dashboards, statistical models and decision-support tools.

• External Landscape Scouting:
  Track relevant advances in materials, analytical techniques, automation and data science; evaluate and integrate the most impactful elements into internal practice.

• Cross-Functional Influence:
  Work closely with formulation, solid-state, process and analytical partners to ensure methods are practical, scalable and aligned to project needs; communicate results and recommendations with transparency.

• Impact Expansion:
  Move from establishing core capability to demonstrating project impact, enabling adoption across portfolios and advising platform investment decisions.

Essential Skills/

Experience:

• Accountable for driving project to develop screening protocols on a broad compositional space of ternary amorphous solid dispersions with the aim to develop robust work-flows to select optimal formulation design for poorly soluble drugs in active projects.

• Work within the department and with the digitization team to implement improvements in knowledge management and structured data storage related to the project.

• Keep up to date with external landscape, identify relevant external developments, evaluate and implement within AZ.

• Deliver automation solutions to improve efficiency and reduce manual tasks.

• Deliver digitisation solutions to increase productivity and efficiency within solid-state/formulation.

Desirable Skills/

Experience:

• Advanced training in pharmaceutical sciences, materials science, chemical engineering or a related field with a research focus on solid-state or formulation science

• Hands-on experience with amorphous solid dispersions, including polymer selection, miscibility assessment and physical stability risk management

• Practical expertise with enabling technologies such as hot-melt extrusion, spray drying and high-throughput screening

• Proficiency in solid-state and formulation analytics (e.g., XRPD, DSC, TGA, Raman/IR, DVS) and data interpretation for decision-making

• Ability to design and analyze multifactor experiments (DoE), build mechanistic or empirical models and communicate uncertainty

• Coding competency in Python or R for data processing, visualization and automation; familiarity with ELNs, LIMS and structured data standards

• Experience integrating or operating lab automation and robotics to increase…