CURI Academic Year Student Researcher Matchett

Description

Job Title: CURI Academic Year Student Researcher

Classification: Student Employee (non-exempt)

Name and Address of Employer: St. Olaf College 1520 St. Olaf Ave Northfield MN 55057

If the position requires the student to work off campus provide the name and address here:

Department Name: CURI

Unit Number (5 digits): 16118

Length of Position: See Employment Authorization

Contact Person/Supervisor: Faculty advisor

Wage Range: $11.75-12.75

Description of the Position: (Purpose of the Position): Students work together with a faculty member on scholarly or artistic projects.

Project Title: Optimization of the electroporation-based delivery of mRNA into Caenorhabditis

Faculty Mentor: Will Matchett

Project Description: Adult Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) nematodes are about 1mm long and have about 1000 cells with invariant lineage. By comparison an adult human has tens of trillions of cells. Despite these apparent differences the biology of C. elegans mirrors that of humans its estimated that 38% of C. elegans protein-encoding genes have human homologs. Recent studies have identified natural viral pathogens of Caenorhabditis nematodes including the Orsay virus. This RNA virus is the first and only identified virus capable of naturally infecting C. elegans. Interestingly this virus does not infect all members of the Caenorhabditis genus and I am interested in interrogating the species barriers to transmission using a novel electroporation strategy. The student hired for this project would work to clone a replication-defective version of the Orsay virus that will serve as an essential control for their work optimizing the delivery of the virus by electroporation of larval stage worms. The student would be expected to work 8 hours per week which would include a weekly one-on-one meeting and a lab meeting with the rest of the research group.

Transferable Skills: Research and presentations.

Duties and Responsibilities: Each project has its own timing (number of hours per week and number of weeks) as determined by the individual faculty mentor. See the CURI Digital Olaf databasefor individual project descriptions and details.

Qualifications: (Education/Experience/Skills) A student interested in applying for the CURI academic year program must be enrolled as an on-campus St. Olaf student. There is no GPA requirement that must be met in order to apply for the program but a students academic record will be considered during the selection process. Skills are dependent on individual projects.

If you dont have a work award and select No to the application questions your application will be automatically rejected by the system. If you apply and are rejected please contact Erin Eltonga to resolve this for you.

This job description is for general information purposes. It is not intended to list all duties and responsibilities of the job description is subject to change at any time by St. Olaf College with or without prior notice.