UiT The Arctic University of Norway has established «The Arctic MSCA-PF program» (uit.no/project/arcticmsca) to recruit excellent young researchers planning to apply for a Marie Skƚodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship (MSCA-PF) to pursue a career in research. We invite applications from promising young researchers within the field of Cell Biology and selective autophagy. The selected candidate will write a proposal for a 24-month MSCA-PF at UiT together with Professor Terje Johansen . This is an opportunity to accelerate your research career while living in the urban research city of Tromsø, uniquely located at the top of the world surrounded by some of Europe’s last pristine wild nature.

This call is one of 70 from pre-selected supervisors at UiT The Arctic University of Norway through the “Arctic MSCA-PF program”. Successful postdoc candidates will be invited for a three-day MSCA-PF symposium June 4-6, 2024 (hybrid physical/digital event, see details at uit.no/project/arcticmsca/program-structure). At this event, the candidates will present their past research achievements, discuss future plans with their potential supervisor and learn how to write a successful MSCA-PF application. The selected candidates will, jointly with the supervisor, write the MSCA-PF application by the deadline of September 11, 2024.

In this call we search for talented, young researchers within the field of Cell Biology and selective autophagy as presented by Professor Johansen:

Autophagy is an evolutionary conserved lysosomal degradation pathway for surplus or damaged cytosolic components to maintain cellular homeostasis. Autophagy declines with age and its function or dysfunction impacts major diseases including cancer, neurodegenerative diseases,  myopathies, cardiovascular- and liver diseases, ageing, infections and inflammation. Autophagy can be both selective and non-selective. Selective autophagy mediates specific degradationof excessive or toxic structures, including protein aggregates, organelles and intracellular pathogens. Our group made a breakthrough in the field of autophagy by identifying the first selective autophagy receptor, p62/SQSTM1. In collaboration with the groups of Ivan Dikic and Masaaki Komatsu we also identified NBR1 as the second mammalian autophagy receptor. We showed that their degradation depends on a direct interaction with ATG8 family proteins present at the inner surface of forming autophagosomes, and that binding is mediated by a short linear amino acid sequence motif we named LIR (LC3-interacting region). We have also recently identified several mitophagy receptors and very recently we expanded the family of soluble autophagy receptors by discovering CALCOCO1 functioning both as an ERphagy and a Golgiphagy receptor. A major focus of our research is to provide a better understanding of the roles and regulation of the autophagy receptors and the ATG8 family proteins in selective autophagy. 

Please send your CV (max 3 pages) and describe a research project that will strengthen and complement the presented research (max 2 pages) to terje.johansen@uit.no by Feb 16th 2024. Mark your application "Arctic MSCA". Successful candidates will be contacted in late March 2024.