26 Postdoctoral Fellowship at University of Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom

A postdoctoral researcher is sought for a three-year post in the lab of Prof. Andrew Jackson FRS, to investigate the cellular basis of human genome stability disorders. The purpose of this post is to understand the cellular basis of human genome stability disorders. The successful applicant will investigate how and where endogenous Topoisomerase 1-mediated DNA damage occurs and causes mutagenesis. As well, there will be the opportunity to investigate the downstream consequences and modulators for innate immune activation and clearance of damaged DNA.

We are looking for an enthusiastic and motivated cancer biologist to join our team in melanoma heterogeneity. Our group forms part of a vibrant research community within the MRC Human Genetics Unit where our specific focus is understanding how heterogeneous melanoma cell populations contribute to disease progression. Strong interest in cancer heterogeneity and/or bar coding technologies is crucial whilst previous experience in omics analysis and melanoma model techniques are desirable.

We are looking for an experienced and highly motivated Postdoctoral Research Fellow to join the Baillie Laboratory (www.baillielab.net), led by Prof Kenneth Baillie at the Roslin Institute and Baillie Gifford Pandemic Science Hub. 

The Baillie Lab is an interdisciplinary team of dedicated and highly capable people, focused on using genetics to find new therapies and treatments for critically ill patients. The team has made several contributions that have already improved medical practice. This includes using genetics to find the cause of unknown hepatitis in children (Nature, 2023a; Nature, 2023b) and identifying 49 genetic variants underlying with critical illness in COVID-19 (Nature, 2023; Nature, 2022). 

The Baillie Lab run several large-scale projects and studies including GenOMICC (www.genomicc.org), ISARIC4C (www.isaric4c.net) and the Outbreak Data Analysis Platform (www.odap.ac.uk) 

The aim of the role is to use genomic data to understand the mechanisms why patients respond differently to infection and to identify potential therapeutic targets to improve treatment outcomes for critically-ill patients. 

We are seeking a post-doctoral research assistant to help in our studies of the neuromodulation and coordination of locomotion by brainstem and spinal networks. The lab utilizes a combination of cutting-edge behavioural, molecular, imaging and electrophysiological approaches in the zebrafish model system. Successful candidates will demonstrate expertise in these areas and will contribute to the establishment of a new lab under the supervision of an established PI, including the training of new personnel, assembly and ordering of equipment, collection and analysis of data, and the writing of grants and manuscripts. Evidence of team building, resilience, overcoming obstacles, and research independence are particularly desirable.

To work on advancing global land-use and scenario modelling, covering forest outcomes and scenarios based on the IPBES Nature Futures Framework

This post is fixed term (30 months) and full-time (35 hours per week), however, we are open to considering part-time or flexible working patterns. We are also open to considering requests for hybrid working (on a non-contractual basis) that combines a mix of remote and regular on-campus working. 

We are looking for an exceptional candidate to join the School of Mathematics at the University of Edinburgh to conduct research on the use of generative machine learning models and synthetic time series data with applications to Finance. 

This post is advertised as full-time (35 hours per week). We are open to considering requests for hybrid working (on a non-contractual basis) that combine a mix of remote and regular on-campus working.

We are seeking a postdoctoral researcher to help develop and apply advanced, RNA-based approaches to important problem in cell biology. 

We are looking for an enthusiastic individual to join our thriving bioinformatics public engagement programme, 4273pi (https://4273pi.org), as Postdoctoral Research Associate in Bioinformatics Education. The post involves designing, planning, delivering and researching public engagement with secondary schools across Scotland.

Post-consumer plastic waste is emerging as a promising feedstock for the circular bioeconomy. We and others have engineered de novo biosynthetic pathways in microbial hosts to convert waste polyester-derived small molecules such as terephthalic acid and 3-hydroxybutyrate into higher-value chemical products such as vanillin, catechol and acetone, which are currently synthesized directly from fossil fuels at industrial scale (Green Chem., 2021, 23, 4665-4672; ACS Sustainable Chem. Eng. 2024, 12, 7748–7756). This approach holds huge potential to improve the sustainability of the plastics and chemicals industries, however the scope of chemicals accessible by biological pathways alone is limited by the biocatalysts available. This project aims to address this by developing novel and scalable enzymatic pathways and biocompatible chemistries to upcycle plastic-derived monomers into high value flavour and fragrance molecules via one-pot, chemo-enzymatic pathways that exploit the ‘best of both worlds’ of biocatalysed and abiotic chemistry (ChemBioChem2020, 21, 3489–3491, RSC Chem. Biol. 2021, 2, 1073-1083). 

This project is part of the Preventing Plastic Pollution using Engineering Biology (P3EB) Mission Hub. P3EB is a pioneering initiative aimed at transforming end-of-life plastic waste using cutting-edge engineering biology technologies. Working in partnership with industry, we will impart value into plastic waste, incentivising its recovery and retention, and so reducing the amount destined for landfill, for incineration, or being discarded into the environment.

The P3EB Mission Hub is a consortium of researchers and innovators assembled from the University of Portsmouth (lead), University of Edinburgh, Bangor University, University of Cambridge, Imperial College London, University of Manchester and University College London. The initiative will receive £11.2 million from the “UKRI Technology Missions Fund” over the next 5 years. 

As a P3EB Mission Hub member, you will have access to training in cross-disciplinary topics such as intellectual property, AI, and responsible research and innovation. You will also have opportunities to visit collaborators’ laboratories, engage in interdisciplinary research and innovation, participate in regular online Researcher Forums, and attend Annual General Meetings of the Mission Hub at locations across the UK.

We are looking for a postdoctoral researcher to develop novel stem cell gene therapies for childhood neurological diseases. Your main role will be to develop and improve ex vivo stem cell gene therapies for Mucopolysaccharide diseases. Experience of working with mouse disease models and gene or cell therapy is essential.

This is an exciting opportunity for a Senior Research Fellow in Medical Statistics to join Edinburgh Clinical Trials Unit (ECTU), a leading registered trials unit based within the Usher Institute, University of Edinburgh. ECTU has a proven track record on delivering research and answering important questions about treatment and service delivery within the NHS. We work closely with patient groups and clinicians who are outstanding in their field.

As a key member of the statistics leadership team within ECTU and highly valued academic contributor, the post holder will have a high level of involvement in the statistical design, analysis and reporting of clinical research projects. The post holder will also be expected to be involved as a co-applicant on funding applications with the aim of generating substantial research income and growth for the ECTU portfolio through collaborative involvement. In addition, the post holder will be encouraged to lead on trials methodological research projects, and develop statistical methodological expertise within the Unit.

Applicants must have an MSc or PhD in medical statistics and a significant level of experience relating to the design, conduct, analysis, interpretation and reporting of clinical trials.  Extensive experience of writing funding applications is also essential to the post. We are looking for an enthusiastic, resourceful and highly organised person who is able to work independently, managing their own workload and working as part of a multidisciplinary team. Applicants will possess experience of managing staff and projects and will have good problem-solving and interpersonal skills.

This post is full-time (35 hours per week), and is available immediately for 24 months in the first instance.  Part-time work would also be considered.  Informal enquiries may be directed to Prof Steff Lewis [email protected] or Prof. Chris Weir [email protected]. If you are interested but don’t have exactly the right skills and experience, or are over-qualified for this particular role, please do get in touch to talk about opportunities.

We are looking for exceptionally talented and motivated computational scientist to take up a fully funded position as postdoctoral research associate (PDRA) in deep learning for drug discovery, as part of the EPSRC Early Career Fellowship ‘GREET: Generative Recombinant Enzyme Engineering for Therapeutics’, led by Dr Giovanni Stracquadanio. 

We are an interdisciplinary group based at the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Edinburgh, interested in addressing challenges in healthcare and biotechnology, and aiming at continuously improving our strong publications and funding track record (www.stracquadaniolab.org).

The School of Informatics is one of the largest research centres in Computer Science in Europe, and it has been ranked #1 in the UK in terms of research power by a large margin. Informatics, Edinburgh is world renowned in Machine Learning and Reinforcement Learning, publishing in all the top venues in these fields. We are offering an exciting opportunity to work in an interdisciplinary, collaborative, friendly, and supportive environment, integrating different sub-fields of within Artificial Intelligence. 

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms aim to train a decision policy for an agent to achieve a specified task in an environment. The agent’s policy is trained by choosing actions which maximise the cumulative rewards received by the agent from its environment. With the introduction of deep learning into RL, “deep RL” algorithms have achieved unprecedented scalability, enabling the solution of complex decision tasks, such as autonomous driving [1] and beating human champions in games such as Go [2]. However, a current limitation of deep RL is that the training process typically requires orders of many millions of environment interactions in the precise environment (i.e. training data), which is infeasible in real-world applications where obtaining samples poses a significant bottleneck. Good transferability between different related environments is also still not generally achievable. Thus, developing approaches to improve the sample efficiency of deep RL algorithms, i.e. learning good policies with minimal data or from information learnt elsewhere, is a high-priority research topic.

Akin to the idea that, for humans, reading the rules of e.g. a board game helps a person play that game better and more immediately than just doing random things and seeing what happens, in this project we consider the benefit of multimodal image and textual sources for data efficient RL. The researcher will be involved in deploying multimodal benchmarks for RL, and developing integrative models that can understand the implication of textual cues to aid understanding of the environment, the action space, the reward space, and the potential policy space. This method will utilise recent approaches in contrastive learning to aid this

 

 

We are looking for Postdoctoral Research Associates in nonlinear dispersive PDEs.
Research experience in harmonic analysis and/or probability would be helpful.

We are looking for an experienced and highly motivated Postdoctoral Research Fellow to join the Baillie Laboratory (www.baillielab.net), led by Prof Kenneth Baillie at the Roslin Institute and Baillie Gifford Pandemic Science Hub. 

The Baillie Lab is an interdisciplinary team of dedicated and highly capable people, focused on using genetics to find new therapies and treatments for critically ill patients. The team has made several contributions that have already improved medical practice. This includes using genetics to find the cause of unknown hepatitis in children (Nature, 2023a; Nature, 2023b) and identifying 49 genetic variants underlying with critical illness in COVID-19 (Nature, 2023; Nature, 2022). 

The Baillie Lab run several large-scale projects and studies including GenOMICC (www.genomicc.org), ISARIC4C (www.isaric4c.net) and the Outbreak Data Analysis Platform (www.odap.ac.uk) 

The aim of the role is to use genomic data to understand the mechanisms why patients respond differently to infection and to identify potential therapeutic targets to improve treatment outcomes for critically-ill patients. 

This post is advertised as full-time (35 hours per week); however, we are open to considering part-time or flexible working patterns. 

The School of Chemistry are looking to recruit a Postdoctoral Research Associate – chemical assembly and single-molecule detection of transmembrane processes (Cockroft/Horrocks groups)

This post is full-time (35 hours per week), however, we are open to considering part-time or flexible working patterns. We are also open to considering requests for hybrid working (on a non-contractual basis) that combines a mix of remote and regular on-campus working.

A postdoctoral research position is available in the lab of Dr Susan Johnston (Institute of Ecology & Evolution) on evolutionary genomics of recombination rate variation in wild birds and mammals. We are looking for an enthusiastic and motivated postdoc to work with genomic data to characterise variation in population- and individual-level recombination landscapes wild long-term wild studies.

The project is part of a Royal Society-funded project on genetic basis and evolution of recombination variation. Meiotic recombination (i.e. chromosomal “crossovers”) is beneficial as it promotes proper chromosome segregation and creates new combinations of alleles upon which selection can act. However, it has the cost of increasing mutations and can break up previously beneficial allele combinations. Despite these trade-offs, relatively little is known about how and why the rate of recombination varies, particularly between the sexes (known as heterochiasmy) or between individuals, populations and species. Our group aims to better understand the causes and consequences of recombination rate variation in wild and domesticated populations.

This project will use genomic data in long-term pedigreed mammal and bird studies to investigate the causes, consequences, and correlates on variation in recombination landscapes, with a specific focus on sex differences. The PDRA will take advantage of an established analytical pipelines for estimating crossover positions within pedigrees and will investigate cross-sex variation in recombination landscapes. In addition, the PDRA will use whole-genome sequence data from unrelated individuals to investigate fine-scale recombination landscapes at the population level. The project includes funds for genotyping/sequencing, training, computing and attending international conferences. There is scope to tailor the project to the skills and interests of the PDRA, and to develop independent lines of research.

Applicants should have a strong background in genetics and a PhD in a relevant subject area (population and/or quantitative genetics, evolutionary biology, and/or working with recombination data). Experience working with genomic data and bioinformatics skills are essential, as is a strong track record of independent and creative thinking.

This position is affiliated with the UKRI APRIL AI Hub that aspires to develop AI tools to accelerate innovation across semiconductor technologies, novel microchip designs and system architectures – leading to faster, cheaper, greener and overall, more power-efficient electronics. As one of nine UKRI funded AI Hubs, this is a highly visible programme both nationally and internationally. 

The post-holder will work closely with a team of talented researchers and the APRIL operations team to lead the development of novel AI capabilities, tools and methodologies that can enhance the productivity of engineers in designing, developing and testing advanced electronic devices and systems. More specifically, the post-holder should have experience in developing and introducing AI tools in electronics testing and verification for predicting what to test and when. The research spans from improving scenario coverage in certification tests across devices/systems to automatically deciphering underlying physical mechanism is emerging beyond-CMOS devices.

The post-holder will have the ability to engage with world-leading experts across AI and electronics both at Edinburgh and in other UK higher education (HE) institutions but also industrial partners to ensure relevance of their Research in addressing state-of-art challenges in electronics. 

The post is full-time (35 hours per week) and fixed term for 2 years. It is possible to extend as per performance and further discussion.

The successful candidate will be supervised by Dr. Changjian Li and Dr. Laura Sevilla-Lara (with a dotted line to Prof. Melissa Terras). In collaboration with other researchers at Abertay University, the team will study generative AI methods to design new machine learning systems to enhance the current workflows of the creative industry, from content creation (2D and 3D), exploration to use (animation, simulation). The successful candidate will also have the opportunity to work with world-leading industry partners in gaming, animation and film sectors by discovering new research topics, developing thoughtful integration of generative AI into virtual production and performance pipelines, and accessing real industrial data as a unique advantage.

A postdoc is required for a multidisciplinary research group (Dr Selvaraj/ Prof Wishart /Prof Chandran) within the UK Dementia Research Institute to contribute and expand our knowledge on pathophysiology of motor neuron disease (MND) with an ultimate goal of developing novel therapeutics and development to clinical trial. In particular, this project will investigate cellular dysfunction in motor neurons and role of glial cells in modulating motor neuron function in MND using various patient derived 2D human stem cell models. This project will also involve in testing high value candidate drugs that emerge from ongoing drug discovery projects in Edinburgh. The post holder will conduct original research and produce data for high quality publications, grant proposals and dissemination to the public. 

We are looking to hire a highly motivated Research Fellow in Food Systems Thinking (Analytical Support), with excellent analytical, organisational and interpersonal skills, to work on our new Wellcome Trust Living Good Food Nation Lab project (https://wellcome.org/grant-funding/people-and-projects/grants-awarded/building-health-centred-net-zero-aligned-food). 

This project is closely linked to exciting new Scottish legislation, the Good Food Nation (Scotland) Act, and aims to support its ongoing implementation. Led by University of Edinburgh Business School, our transdisciplinary team brings together academic, governmental, public sector and 3^rd sector partners with expertise in nutrition and public health, environmental modelling, public food procurement, food policy and governance, anthropology, and sociology, of food, food and procurement law, social policy, behavioural change, and food systems transformation. 

This post is advertised as fixed term (36 months) and full-time (35 hours per week) however, we are open to considering part-time (4-5 days) and/or flexible working patterns.  We are also open to considering requests for hybrid working (on a non-contractual basis) that combines a mix of remote and regular on-campus working with a minimum requirement for 2 days/week on campus working.

We are looking for a postdoctoral researcher to develop novel stem cell gene therapies for childhood neurological diseases. Your main role will be to develop to develop a novel therapy for Sanfilippo disease (MPSIIIA) using gene-corrected iPSC-derived neuronal cells. Experience of working with mouse disease models and iPSCs is essential.

 

This post is advertised as full-time (35 hours per week); however, we are open to considering part-time or flexible working patterns.