PhD position available: One-cell at a time – Uncovering How Enhancers Orchestrate Cardiovascular Fate Using Single-Cell Multi-Omics

Project title: One-cell at a time – Uncovering How Enhancers Orchestrate Cardiovascular Fate Using Single-Cell Multi-Omics

A 4-year PhD position (fully funded by the NRPDTP Doctoral Training Partnership) is available at University of East Anglia (UEA) jointly supervised by Professor Andrea Münsterberg and Dr Gi Fay Mok, with collaborators Dr Iain Macaulay and Dr Wilfried Haerty at the Earlham Institute starting October 2026.

We are looking for an ambitious and highly motivated student to uncover how non-coding cis-regulatory elements (also called enhancers) control early cardiovascular development using single-cell multi-omics during embryo development.

What’s the big question?

The heart, blood and vessels arise from neighbouring progenitors during embryogenesis. We know many transcription factors – but which enhancers switch the right genes on at the right time and place, and how do they wire fate decisions? In this new and exciting project you will be applying cutting-edge single-cell multi-omic approaches (scRNA-seq + scATAC-seq) to chart enhancer activity during early heart, blood and vessel formation. The student will use advanced bioinformatics to predict active enhancers, reconstruct GRNs and identify conserved elements; clone candidate enhancers into fluorescent reporters for live imaging in ovo; and use CRISPR-based perturbations to test enhancer function and link regulatory logic to cell behaviour, migration and fate. You’ll join a collaborative team across UEA and the Earlham Institute, gaining cross-disciplinary skills in developmental biology, molecular genetics, high-resolution imaging and computational biology.

About you:

We are keen to hear from applicants with enthusiasm for cell, molecular biology, developmental genetics/regulatory genomics. Backgrounds in biology, bioinformatics or a related quantitative field are all welcome.

Interested?

Contact a.munsterberg@uea.ac.uk or g.mok@uea.ac.uk for details and how to apply. (Please include a CV and a brief paragraph on your motivation/fit.)

See NRP DTP website for more information – https://biodtp.norwichresearchpark.ac.uk/projects/one-cell-at-a-time-uncovering-how-enhancers-orchestrate-cardiovascular-fate-using-single-cell-multi-omics-munsterberg_u26dtp/ 

Deadline for application is 2nd December 2025