Postdoctoral Fellow (Cincinnati Children's Hospital)

We are seeking highly motivated applicants to investigate light receptors, metabolic regulation, and nervous system development. This fellowship is a two year full-time position, with the opportunity for a two year renewal.

The Lang lab is currently working to understand how the non-visual opsins, specifically OPN3 (encephalopsin), OPN4 (melanopsin), and OPN5 (neuropsin), regulate light-dependent development and homeostasis. We have shown that both melanopsin/OPN4 (Rao et al., Nature, 2013) and neuropsin/OPN5 (Nguyen et al., Nature Cell Biology, 2019) provide timing cues for vascular development in the eye and regulate refractive (Linne et al., Mol Vis, 2023, Jiang et al., PNAS, 2021) and photoreceptor (D’Souza et al., Dev Cell, 2024) development.

We have also shown that OPN3 in adipocytes and in the paraventricular nucleus (Nayak et al., Cell Reports, 2020; Haddad et al., PNAS, 2025), as well as OPN5 in hypothalamic neurons (Zhang et al., 2020), regulate metabolism and energy homeostasis.

Thus, our work describes a new light-dependent physiological axis, and these emerging areas of investigation promise extremely interesting findings.

Ideal candidates will have a PhD in genetics, molecular, cell, or developmental biology, or a related field. While a thorough theoretical and practical understanding of molecular and cell biology is a prerequisite, knowledge of chronobiology and photoreceptors is advantageous. Skills with quantitative and computational analysis are also highly desirable.

The Lang lab primarily uses mice as our model system, and we make heavy use of genetic, behavioral and '-omic' methodologies. Experience with these methods would be beneficial. All applicants should also be proficient in written and spoken English.