Scientific Writer Life Science
Astera Institute is an active nonprofit research institute and foundation that operates in-house neuroscience-informed AI research and funds, operates, and supports open-science programs and public goods.
About Astera Institute
Astera operates three divisions: Neuro-AI, Radial life-sciences research, and its Foundation. Its AI work pursues neuroscience-informed approaches to artificial general intelligence, while its foundation and Radial activities support open scientific infrastructure, datasets, research programs, and residencies.
Skills
Candidate Availability
Required and preferred rules are kept separate and reflect the wording in the original posting.
About the Role
You will edit scientific publications for argument, structure, clarity, and accuracy. You will draft posts from interviews and research results, guide publication strategy, ensure releases meet open-science standards, direct visual communication work, improve documentation, and support researchers across life-science programs.
Requirements
- PhD in a life-science field and at least 2 years of scientific writing and editing experience, or 5 or more years of equivalent industry experience
- Ability to interpret unfamiliar method sections and codebases
- Demonstrated technical writing
- Demonstrated editing ability
- Proficiency with Git, GitHub, Markdown, notebooks, and a documentation toolchain
- Ability to tailor writing to different audiences
- Experience publishing research in formats beyond static PDFs
- Ability to work across multiple technical domains
- Experience building interactive scientific content, open-source scientific software, or relevant life-science domains is preferred
Responsibilities
- Edit research outputs and scientific publications
- Draft and edit blog posts from interviews, documents, and results
- Ensure releases meet open-science requirements
- Maintain the publication pipeline
- Advise on publication strategy and release formats
- Develop interactive and web-native communication formats
- Direct designers and developers on figures, interactive builds, and demos
- Build templates and tools for scholarly communication
- Refine slide decks
- Document computational methods and algorithms
- Partner on documentation and dataset standards