EPSRC MediForge Hub: Process Integration Research Fellow (647357)

Applications are invited for a Platform Research Fellow (grade 8) to work in the EPSRC MediForge: Industry 5.0 Medicines Manufacturing Research Hub (www.cmac.ac.uk) being delivered by CMAC.

Term: Fixed-term until 31/08/2028

CMAC is a world leading medicines manufacturing research centre based in the Technology and Innovation Centre (TIC) at the University of Strathclyde. The centre works closely with leading pharmaceutical companies to transform the way that medicines are developed and made and support a portfolio of research programmes to deliver our shared vision.

Applications are invited for a Platform Research Fellow (grade 8) to work in the EPSRC MediForge: Industry 5.0 Medicines Manufacturing Research Hub (www.cmac.ac.uk) being delivered by CMAC. The Hub comprises a multidisciplinary team of academics and researchers located across five leading UK Universities (Strathclyde, Leeds, Sheffield, Imperial College and Glasgow School of Art) providing a platform for collaborative research, training and knowledge exchange in the area of advanced pharmaceutical manufacturing. The MediForge Hub was awarded under EPSRC’s Manufacturing Hubs for A Sustainable Future (Round 2) call and aims to develop a systems level approach for predictive design of sustainable, resilient and human-centric future medicines manufacturing covering multiple stages across drug substance and drug product processing. The CMAC Hub has a large and vibrant programme with key Industry partners including AZ, Chiesi, Lilly, Pfizer, Roche, Sanofi, Takeda and UCB with a broad range of technology companies. The Hub also benefits from significant recent capital investments through our £33M UK RPIF Data Lab partnership creating a world class suite of advanced processing, automation, analysis, digital technologies and computational infrastructure to support MediForge research.

A key goal of Platform 1 is to deliver an integrated cyberphysical research infrastructure (CPRI) that connects comprehensive data generated from a suite of material sparing, self-driving DataFactory platforms for the target processing steps into a novel medicines manufacturing research data fabric. This will integrate with the end-to-end digital twin in Platform 2 to enable whole process design and optimisation for quality and sustainability. Designs will be evaluated from data generated by the MediForge MicroFactory Test Bed (Platform 3) spanning drug substance (synthesis, crystallisation, isolation) and drug product (feeding, blending, compaction) unit operations.

The Process Integration Research Fellow post in Platform 1 reports to the PI and will work closely with a multidisciplinary team of academics, PDRAs and PhDs. Within the multidisciplinary team this post will be principally responsible for ensuring that detailed process understanding across all key primary process steps informs the development and integration of a suite of material sparing process development and testing platforms across scales. The research focus is on addressing unmodelled phenomena at the interfaces between process steps to enable improved predictive design of sustainable end to end processes. The post holder will be responsible for undertaking original experimental research, reporting on project progress and the preparation and submission of research papers arising from these and related studies in the group.

You hold a PhD in a relevant discipline (e.g. Chemical or Pharmaceutical Engineering) or a related area reinforced with several years’ experience in pharmaceutical process development, process systems modelling and optimisation. Ideally you will possess experience in up and downstream processes for pharmaceutical manufacturing, process analysis, scale up/down approaches.

Informal enquiries about the post can be directed to Professor Alastair Florence, Hub Director (alastair.florence@strath.ac.uk).

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