We are always excited to hear from enthusiastic postdoc and PhD candidates. For Bachelor and Master students, we often have projects available for theses or for internships. If we have openings for specific projects, they are listed on this page.
Research internships and theses for TUM students
We often have projects available for students, especially in the TUM Chemical Biotechnology program. If you would like to join our lab as a student, you can either ask our PhD students directly, in particular if you are interested in a specific project, or you can email Henrike. It helps us if you provide the following information:
- Which type of internship or thesis are you interested in? Duration?
- When would you ideally like to do it?
- What are you interested in learning/doing?
- What is your background? Do you already have lab experience, which techniques?
- Please apply in English. If I receive your application, I will typically forward it to team members who might not speak German.
We currently have the following project available:
- 3 months MSc internship: mRNA recruitment into biomolecular condensates
Postdoc (or PhD) positions
The Niederholtmeyer lab for Synthetic Biology is currently looking for up to two postdocs (we will also consider excellent applicants for PhD positions) to join our collaborative, interdisciplinary team at the TUM Campus Straubing for Biotechnology and Sustainability.
Project 1: Many proteins have the ability to spontaneously cluster in molecularly dense, phase-separated liquid-like assemblies, termed biomolecular condensates. Biomolecular condensates are promising as synthetic compartments in cell-free reactions and living cells because they could provide programmable, self-assembled spatial organization and rapidly appear or dissolve on demand. This project uses cell-free synthesis and custom microfluidic tools for the engineering and characterization of biomolecular condensates.
Project 2: Dynamic circuits can control gene expression in time and space. In this project we engineer communication between cell-like compartments to generate self-organizing patterns, similar to what we see during the development of multicellular organisms. To keep cell-like compartments active over time, a microfluidic device maintains optimal conditions for cell-free transcription and translation.
Candidates for both projects should have prior experience with at least one of the following techniques:
- microfluidics
- fluorescence microscopy
- quantitative image analyses
- cell-free expression systems
- engineering synthetic gene circuits
Applications for postdoc positions should consist of a letter of motivation detailing your interests and previous experience including a short highlight of one of your publications, a CV and contact information of a previous mentor/supervisor.