The Chioccioli Lab at Yale School of Medicine (Departments of Genetics and Comparative Medicine) is seeking a highly motivated Postdoctoral Associate with hands-on experience in intravital imaging and imaging-window surgery to lead our in vivo imaging programme. Experience in any organ is welcome, including abdominal organs (liver, pancreas, intestine, kidney, spleen, uterus/embryo), mammary gland, brain, bone marrow, skin or tumours. No prior lung experience is required.
We study how stem cells change identity after injury and how this plasticity can lead to disease. In the lung, alveolar stem cells generate transient intermediate progenitor cells (IPCs). IPCs either restore the tissue or persist in disease states, which makes them a strong candidate cell of origin for fibrosis and cancer. Our earlier intravital work showed that alveolar stem cells migrate between alveoli to repair injured tissue (Chioccioli et al., Developmental Cell 2024, highlighted in Science).
The postdoc will use permanent imaging windows and our state-of-the-art three-photon intravital microscope to follow the same cells over days to weeks in live mice. The goal is to track how progenitor and tumour-initiating cells emerge, move and choose their fate during repair, fibrosis and cancer. We will train you in the lung-specific surgery and biology; we are looking for your surgical and imaging expertise. The position is funded by an NIH/NHLBI R01 and sits within a strong collaborative network at Yale, including the Yale Stem Cell Center, the Wu Tsai Institute and the Yale SPORE in Lung Cancer.
Responsibilities
- Perform survival surgery to implant imaging windows (thoracic and abdominal) and carry out longitudinal 3-photon intravital imaging in lineage-traced mouse models of injury and tumour initiation
- Develop and optimise the imaging pipeline, including window design, motion correction, deep-tissue imaging and long-term re-registration of the same fields
- Quantify cell behaviours such as migration, division, fate transitions and tumour–immune interactions
- Integrate imaging results with lineage tracing, histology and single-nucleus multiome data
- Publish first-author papers, present at meetings, and train lab members in surgery and imaging
Required qualifications
- PhD, MD or MD/PhD in cell or developmental biology, cancer biology, stem cell biology, immunology, biophysics, biomedical engineering or a related field, completed or expected within 6 months
- Hands-on experience implanting chronic imaging windows in mice (e.g., abdominal, mammary, cranial, dorsal skinfold or thoracic)
- Experience with multiphoton (2P/3P) intravital microscopy, ideally longitudinal imaging over days to weeks
- Quantitative image analysis and cell tracking (e.g., Imaris, Fiji, Python or MATLAB)
- Strong communication skills and the ability to work both independently and in a team
Preferred qualifications
- Intravital imaging of tumours, metastasis or tumour–immune interactions
- Experience with deep-tissue or three-photon imaging
- Experience with lineage tracing or regeneration models
- A record of first-author publication
To apply: Please send a CV, a cover letter describing your surgical and imaging experience, research interests and career goals, and contact information for three references to Dr. Maurizio Chioccioli at maurizio.chioccioli@yale.edu. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis. More about the lab: chiocciolilab.com.