Open Postdoctoral position, faculty mentor Emmanuel Mignot

The Mignot Lab (https://www.mignotlab.com) is seeking several postdoctoral fellows or staff to join our group studying brain autoimmunity. We are seeking motivated individuals wanting to make a difference in understanding brain autoimmunity and seeking to publish high impact publications in this growing field of interest. We work on the immunology of narcolepsy and other neurological diseases with an autoimmune basis. The successful candidate will have an outstanding opportunity to explore the connections between infections like influenza and immune responses involving the brain.

The study of narcolepsy will be a primary goal. The reason is that the disease has a clear and simple cause, a loss of orexin neurons, which can now be measured biochemically so there is 100% testing accuracy. In addition, narcolepsy is 100% associated with a single HLA subtype, DQA1*01:02/ DQB1*06:02 and shows strong TCRA and TCRB genetic associations, indicating a restricted causal oligoclonal T cell response.  We also know it is triggered by some flu strains (A/H1N1 and B/Victoria) but not others, aka A/H3N1 (epidemiological and serologically confirmed). This constellation of facts makes the study of narcolepsy a simple model and resolving its immunological basis is likely to lead to novel insight into how autoimmunity develops.   Finally, narcolepsy is also of great interest currently because novel therapies replacing orexin are being developed by the pharmacological industry; prospects for a career in academic or industry are high. In parallel with this effort, we are also working on anti Iglon-5, an HLA-DQ5 associated autoimmune disease associated with tau neurodegeneration and anti NMDAR encephalitis an autoimmune disorder involving brain autoimmunity and ovarian biology.

The postdoctoral fellow or staff will work on identification and characterization of T cells involved in immune recognition of antigens implicated in triggering narcolepsy and other brain autoimmune diseases. The work uses tetramer and dextramer based technologies as well as DNA-barcode multimers for T cell identification. Single cell sorting and single cell sequencing are also employed in the research. The immunological work is supported by a vast collection of patients and control subjects accomplished by Dr. Mignot’s group and collaborators.  We also offer opportunities to participate in collaborations with other groups from Stanford and beyond working on complementary approaches to T cell recognition. Our group provides an intellectually rich environment, with scientists applying genetics, proteomics and machine learning to better understand narcolepsy and other sleep disorders, neurodegeneration and autoimmune diseases. 

We are looking for candidates with experience with:

• Flow cytometry, single cell sorting, and T or B cell characterization using FACS markers.
• Single cell sequencing and analysis, BCR or BCR sequencing analysis and characterization
• Working with biological samples such as cells, or nucleic acids, protein expression and purification
• Sequencing-based assays (RNA-seq, single-cell genomics, or related methods)
• Analyzing genomics datasets in Python or R
• Prior experience with Class I or Class II tetramer and DNA bar coding technology strongly preferred.