ShanghaiTech expands faculty recruitment across immunology, GPCR biology, and drug discovery
ShanghaiTech University is opening a broad faculty search across its School of Life Science and Technology and affiliated research institutes, with appointments available at multiple ranks in research areas that cut through modern biomedicine. The call spans biomedicine, pharmacology, developmental and regenerative biology, genomics, proteomics, bioinformatics, metabolism, physiology, molecular and cellular biology, neuroscience, computational structural biology, and infection and immunology.
The scope is wide, but the scientific center of gravity is clear: disease biology linked to therapeutic development. ShanghaiTech is looking for investigators who can build independent programs while contributing to teaching and mentoring across undergraduate and graduate training. Start-up packages, laboratory space, research associates, postdoctoral support, salary, and housing benefits are all presented as part of the offer, signaling a recruitment strategy aimed at attracting established scientists as well as rising leaders.
A hiring push built around translational biology
The School of Life Science and Technology frames its faculty expansion around research that meets both academic and applied goals. Priority areas include autoimmune disorders such as systemic lupus erythematosus, rheumatoid arthritis, axial spondyloarthritis, and ulcerative colitis, alongside anti-tumor immunity and infectious diseases including tuberculosis, coronavirus, and flavivirus infections. Those disease areas are not random additions. They sit at the intersection of persistent unmet clinical need and mechanistic complexity, where progress depends on investigators who can move from cellular pathways to therapeutic concepts without losing scientific rigor.
The institute is especially interested in candidates who work at the interface of disease mechanism and intervention. Expertise in AI-driven drug design, de novo protein design, bioinformatics, medicinal chemistry, chemical biology, and drug modality development is explicitly sought. In practical terms, that means ShanghaiTech is not just hiring bench scientists; it is recruiting researchers who can shape the molecular logic of next-generation therapies. The emphasis on translational work suggests an appetite for programs that can generate lead compounds, engineer biologics, or identify actionable pathways rather than remaining limited to descriptive biology.
One sentence captures the institutional message plainly: the university wants scientists who can turn mechanism into molecules.
SIAIS puts therapeutic discovery at the center of recruitment
The Shanghai Institute for Advanced Immunochemical Studies, or SIAIS, adds another layer to the search. Founded in 2012 and led by Richard A. Lerner as founding director, the institute describes itself as a platform for originality in biomedical research, with a stated focus on major diseases including infectious and autoimmune disorders. Its structure reflects that ambition. Eighteen laboratories cover infection and immunity, structural biology, AI-driven drug discovery, gene editing, medicinal chemistry, and DNA-encoded library technology.
For faculty candidates, the appeal is obvious: a research environment built around chemical and structural approaches to disease. That combination matters because modern immunology and infectious disease research increasingly depends on target selection, structural insight, and rapid iteration between computation and synthesis. A researcher studying autoimmunity, for example, may now need to integrate pathway biology, antibody engineering, structural modeling, and screening chemistry in the same program. SIAIS is positioning itself as a home for exactly that kind of work.
The institute’s recruitment notice welcomes applicants at all career stages, provided they are committed to biomedical research and therapeutic innovation. The most sought-after profiles are scientists whose work bridges biology and drug discovery, especially those with clear potential to generate novel drug candidates. In other words, publication record matters, but so does direction: the institute is looking for investigators whose next decade of work can still be translated into tangible therapeutic hypotheses.
iHuman focuses on GPCR science and high-end structural platforms
The iHuman Institute offers a more targeted recruitment call, centered on G protein-coupled receptors and drug discovery. GPCRs remain one of the most important target classes in pharmacology, and iHuman is building its faculty around the methods most likely to expose their structure, function, and therapeutic vulnerabilities. The institute is seeking tenure-track or tenured faculty at the assistant, associate, or full professor level in cryo-electron tomography, AI for drug discovery, and chemical biology, pharmacology, cell biology, and neurobiology as applied to GPCR research.
Its platform strength is not an afterthought. iHuman points to a cryo-ET center led by Wolfgang Baumeister, along with access to high-throughput screening, super-resolution imaging, cryo-electron microscopy, biological mass spectrometry, nuclear magnetic resonance, and high-performance computing. For a scientist working on membrane proteins, receptor conformations, or ligand discovery, that infrastructure can define what is experimentally possible. Structural biology is no longer just about seeing a protein; it is about linking dynamic structure to signaling, pharmacology, and eventually drug response.
A second blunt reality sits beneath the recruitment language: GPCR science is expensive, technical, and intensely collaborative. The institute is trying to remove the usual barriers by bundling core facilities, relocation support, start-up funding, and family benefits into the faculty package.
What ShanghaiTech is trying to build in Shanghai
Across the university and its affiliated institutes, the recruitment notice sketches a common strategy. ShanghaiTech is assembling a faculty base that can operate across systems biology, chemical innovation, and disease-focused translational research while taking advantage of major regional resources in Shanghai. The campus is described as being surrounded by major facilities and institutions, including the Shanghai Clinical Research and Trial Center, National Protein Science Center, Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility, Shanghai Free Electron Laser, Chinese National Compound Library, Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, and several universities and biotech companies.
That ecosystem is designed for speed. A research group studying infection biology may need structural data from synchrotron or cryo-EM platforms, chemical support from medicinal chemistry colleagues, and computational analysis from AI teams. A neuroscience lab may require proteomics, imaging, and disease-model expertise. The recruitment notice repeatedly returns to collaboration, suggesting that the university sees proximity and shared infrastructure as a way to accelerate discovery rather than merely expand headcount.
Applications for the School of Life Science and Technology are reviewed on a rolling basis until positions are filled, and the same open-ended structure applies to the institute-level searches. The required materials are straightforward: a cover letter, research statement, curriculum vitae, selected publications, and references. What matters more than paperwork is the profile behind it — scientists capable of building independent programs in fields where mechanism, technology, and therapeutic relevance increasingly converge.