Research Assistant

Northwestern Polytechnic

Northwestern Polytechnic (formerly GPRC) is a comprehensive community institution, established in 1966 in Grande Prairie, and our stewardship region includes campuses in Fairview and Grande Prairie. NWP offers a wide variety of credit and non-credit career certificates and diplomas, pre-employment and apprenticeship trades, university transfer studies, and several opportunities for on-campus degree completion through collaborations with four-year universities. As an educational facility in northwestern Alberta, NWP helps meet the cultural, recreational, athletic and conferencing needs of the region in partnership with community and regional stakeholders. NWP is dedicated to providing learners with access to high quality and diverse lifelong learning opportunities, and to the responsible educational, fiscal and environmental stewardship of resources.

The Department

National Bee Diagnostic Centre - Technology Access Centre (NBDC-TAC) is a research initiative of the School of Applied Research at Northwestern Polytechnic (formerly GPRC)​ which provides diagnostic services for researchers, beekeepers, and agencies across Canada with the aim to contribute towards a healthy, sustainable and profitable apiculture in Canada. NBDC-TAC is seeking to hire a temporary Research Assistant at our state-of-the-art laboratory in Beaverlodge, Alberta to assist with honey-bee research.

The Role

The successful candidate for this position will contribute to the NBDC research team that is working to develop DNA-barcoding to identify pollen in bee samples.

This is temporary full time position with the possibility of extension. This is an in-person position based on our laboratory in Beaverlodge.

Our experiments involve high-throughput molecular profiling of the pollen sampled from honey and other bee matrixes then analyzing the resulting data sets for insights about plant composition and diversity of forage.

Coordination and collaboration within interdisciplinary research teams (that combine biology, statistics and data science) is a key aspect of this research.

Responsibilities include:

Contribute to experimental workflows for profiling the molecular contents and biological states of thousands of pollen samples, contributing to all aspects including planning experiments; creating DNA-barcoding reagents; extracting nuclei from pollen and bees; preparing molecular libraries; and high-throughput DNA sequencing. Optimize and execute molecular-biological reactions such as PCR and high-throughput sequencing. Write protocols, reports and other scientific documents. Assist to develop and deliver training and outreach activities Work effectively in a team environment, participate in meetings, and communicate clearly and professionally with other team members, site managers, and industry professionals. Contribute to other projects as needed.

What We Offer

This position will be 35 hours/week September 1, 2023 to April 30, 2024 with the possibility of extension.

Join our team, grow with us and connect your skills and abilities to our vision, mission and values.

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