Keegstra Bioenergy Research Fellowship Program
The Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC) invites applications for the Keegstra Bioenergy Research Fellowships in integrative bioenergy sciences. We are recruiting talented and highly motivated postdoctoral fellows for projects that cross the traditional bioenergy boundaries of plant genetics, biomass deconstruction, microbial engineering, and sustainability. Candidates must be within three years of a PhD degree at the start of the fellowship and must not have been previously associated with GLBRC.
Keegstra Fellows play a special role in enhancing cross-team research integration within GLBRC, promoting interdisciplinary approaches to advance research in lignocellulosic bioenergy and bioproducts. Successful candidates will work with two faculty mentors, each based in one of the Center’s research areas: field-to-product integration, sustainable cropping systems, and efficient biomass conversion.
The Keegstra Fellowships are two-year appointments with a salary starting at $60,000 per year.
Keegstra Fellowship Topic Areas
See below for descriptions of the topic areas we are currently recruiting and contact information for each position's advisors. For application inquiries, contact the position's primary advisory.
Optimizing microbial conversion of bioenergy sorghum biomass to advanced biofuels and bioproducts
The successful candidate will design a project to address two critical knowledge gaps using the yeast chassis Saccharomyces cerevisiae. First, they will seek to evaluate and understand the utility of the various NSP and lignocellulosic sugar streams for microbial upgrading to the advanced biofuel isobutanol. Second, they will discover and overcome specific conversion bottlenecks using multiomics (e.g. using genome-wide deletion, CRISPR, and overexpression libraries; transcriptomics; proteomics; metabolomics), libraries of diverse yeast strains, and/or other approaches to optimize strains using Design-Test-Learn cycles. The position will be located at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Advisors
Chris Todd Hittinger
Associate Professor of Genetics
University of Wisconsin–Madison
cthittinger@wisc.edu
John Mullet
Perry L. Adkisson Chair in Agricultural Biology
Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics
Texas A&M
jmullet@tamu.edu