PhD Scholarship: Discovering the Hidden Functions of Viral Dark Matter in Phage Genomes

Description

A PhD scholarship is available within Professor Robert Edwards’ ARC Laureate Fellowship program "New Horizons for Synthetic Phages", at Flinders University.

Bacteriophages, or phages, are viruses that infect and kill bacteria. They have enormous potential to help address the global antimicrobial resistance crisis, but most phage genes encode proteins whose functions remain unknown. These “hypothetical proteins” represent one of the largest reservoirs of uncharacterised biological function.

This PhD project will develop and apply new experimental and computational approaches to identify the functions of unknown phage proteins, with a particular focus on proteins that bind, cut, modify, or otherwise interact with DNA. You will help establish sequencing-based assays to detect protein–DNA interactions in phage genomes, including approaches using Oxford Nanopore sequencing to compare cross-linked and untreated phage DNA preparations. The project will integrate molecular biology, microbiology, high-throughput sequencing, and bioinformatics to identify DNA-binding motifs and infer the biological roles of phage proteins.

The successful candidate will join an interdisciplinary team working across phage biology, microbiology, synthetic biology, metagenomics, and computational biology. The work will contribute to a broader program aimed at making phages safer, more predictable, and more useful for future applications in human health, agriculture, livestock, and environmental microbiology.

Benefits

The scholarship includes:

• A stipend at the University's standard rate (currently $36,061.00 per year), indexed annually, for 3.5 years.
• Tuition fee offset or waiver, subject to eligibility and scholarship conditions.
• Support for project expenses, computing, data analysis, software development, and research training.
• Training in in microbiology, phage biology, molecular biology, DNA sequencing, and bioinformatics.
• Access to a world-class interdisciplinary research environment in phage biology, microbial genomics, metagenomics, and synthetic biology.
• Opportunities to participate in national and international conferences, workshops, and collaborations.
• Unparalleled networking opportunities through the Laureate Fellowship team and its national and international collaborators.
• Deep disciplinary training in both experimental microbiology and computational genome analysis.

Eligibility

To be eligible, applicants must:

• Meet Flinders University PhD admission requirements, normally through Honours I/IIA, a Master’s degree, or equivalent research experience.
• Be eligible to enrol as a full-time PhD candidate at Flinders University.
• Be able to take up the scholarship within 3 months of the offer, unless an extension is approved.
• Be physically based at Flinders University for the duration of the candidature. 
• Meet any relevant institutional, biosafety, ethics, or background-check requirements associated with laboratory-based microbiology and molecular biology research.

All PhD projects are full-time. No positions are remote-only. Candidates must be physically based at Flinders University to ensure a strong, collaborative cohort is developed across the Laureate Fellowship program. Candidates will be expected to participate actively in laboratory meetings, cohort activities, research training, workshops, and relevant national or international conferences.