Scientific Writer, Life Science (Radial)

The role

The Scientific Writer will shape and sharpen scientific content by editing research outputs and drafting blog posts. This person will direct visual communication work and train researchers on scholarly communications.

What you will do

• Edit research outputs and scientific publications for argument, structure, and copy editing
• Draft and edit blog posts from interviews, internal documents, and raw results
• Ensure releases meet Open Science policy regarding identifiers, licenses, and repositories
• Advise on publication strategy and the smallest independently useful unit of release
• Propose alternative formats like interactive figures and executable code
• Direct external designers and developers on figures, interactive builds, and demos
• Build templates and tools for scientific communication formats
• Refine slide decks for talks, funder meetings, and internal reviews
• Help researchers document computational methods and algorithms
• Partner with Data Steward on documentation and dataset standards

Required qualifications

• PhD in a life science field plus at least 2 years of work experience in scientific writing and editing; or 5+ years of equivalent industry experience
• Technical depth to read method sections or codebases and identify undocumented assumptions
• Demonstrated technical writing such as documentation, tutorials, or method write-ups
• Demonstrated editing range to improve argument and structure without flattening voice
• Comfort with Git/GitHub, Markdown, notebooks, and at least one documentation toolchain (Sphinx, MkDocs, Quarto, Jupyter Book, or similar)
• Judgment about audience for different types of scientific writing
• Experience publishing research outputs in formats other than the static PDF
• Ability to work across several programs in different technical domains

Nice to have

• experience building interactive scientific content (e.g. D3, Observable, Plotly, Quarto, or similar)
• experience maintaining or contributing to open-source scientific software
• familiarity with any of our domains — structural biology, drug discovery and ADMET, gene and drug delivery, or scientific infrastructure

Benefits

• competitive compensation package

About the company

Astera is a private foundation on a mission to steer science and technology toward a better future. Radial is a research organization within Astera focused on rethinking life science research at a systems level.