27 Postdoctoral Fellowship at King’s College London, United Kingdom

This full-time post relates to funding received from the University of Tohoku. The Postdoctoral Research Associate will work full-time over 36 months. 

The research will investigate the ethical and social challenges associated with Large Language Models deployed in morally loaded contexts (such as healthcare, justice and education). Among these challenges, the communication of uncertainty is of particular interest.

The project will be hosted by and managed at the Centre for Data Futures, part of the Dickson Poon School of Law (King’s College London), in collaboration with the Centre for Language AI Research (Tohoku University, led by Professor Jun Suzuki). This project requires the Research Associate to travel once a year to Tohoku University’s Centre for Language AI research (for a minimum of 2 weeks).

This competitive award will support up to two years of salary for the successful individual and will contribute to their planned project costs. The intention of the award is to enhance the candidate’s competitiveness for post-doctoral fellowships in either commercial or academic sectors through the completion and publication of original research generated during their PhD, and/or the generation of preliminary data. We envisage year one to cover the work required to submit a manuscript and year two to cover peer review revision work and the generation of preliminary data to support the planned fellowship applications.

In this position, you will work on projects seeking to characterise the neurocomputational mechanisms underpinning complex decision-making, with a view to understanding how these processes go awry in people who experience pathological worry. You will be responsible for the design and implementation of computational models and behavioural assessments, with the possibility of expanding this work into neuroimaging at a later date.

We are looking for applicants with a PhD in the area of regenerative or cell biology, with strong skills in analysing gene function and regulation. Experience of working with zebrafish or muscle would be beneficial as would skills in analysing transcriptomic data. Candidates should have an excellent research track record, be committed to the project and keen to work in a multidisciplinary team.

Key requirements will involve functional evaluation of candidate ageing modifiers genes and molecules for their roles in regulating cell behaviour in regenerating muscle of zebrafish. Complementary assays using human cells will be used to determine conservation of function in vertebrates and to identify candidate targets for promoting healthy muscle in ageing. Live cell imaging and analysis, gene function analysis, cell culture, use of zebrafish as a model organism, transcriptomics and molecular network modelling are key skills for this project.

A significant barrier to reaping the benefits of predictive and generative AI is their unassessed potential for harms. Hence, AI auditing has become imperative, in line with existing and impending regulatory frameworks. Yet, AI auditing has been haphazard, unsystematic, and left solely in the hands of experts. This project investigates how to enable individual and collective participatory auditing of current and future AI technologies so that diverse stakeholders beyond AI experts can be involved in auditing their harms. Our research will systematically investigate stakeholders’ needs for and notions of fairness and harms to create auditing workbenches comprising novel user interfaces, algorithms and privacy-preserving mechanisms that help stakeholders to perform audits whilst guarding against unintended negative effects or abuse by malicious actors.

We are seeking a highly motivated and experienced researcher, holding a PhD in biophysics, biochemistry  or related disciplines that has experience and is interested in different aspects of single molecule mechanobiology. The candidate will work with single molecule AFM and magnetic tweezers to study the nanomechanical properties of cell-cell junction proteins.

The project is funded by a BBSRC sLOLA programme. The project will be developed between the Francis Crick Institute and the Department of Physics at King’s College London.

We are looking for a research assistant with a keen interest in tax policy, particularly tax avoidance and evasion. The research assistant will support and assist with data cleaning and analysis for a British Academy-funded project on inheritance tax in the United Kingdom. This role involves working primarily in the HMRC Datalab in London, handling large micro-level administrative datasets.

This is an exciting opportunity to work within a multidisciplinary team that includes world experts in managing symptoms in long-term health conditions, health economists, statisticians and policymakers. The post-holder will work as part of a team on REFUEL-MS, which is a 5.5-year programme of research jointly funded by the MS Society and the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Programme Grant.

We are 2 years into the programme and during this time, we have co-developed the intervention content and designed and built the first version of the app. This has involved reviewing existing evidence-based exercise and behavioural interventions, conducting qualitative interviews with people living with MS (pwMS), carers, and healthcare professionals (HCPs), and collaborating with key stakeholders and diversity consultants to develop a personalised, HCP-supported digital fatigue treatment. 

We are seeking a Research Associate to join our preclinical neuroimaging laboratory, The BRAIN Centre ( https://brain-imaging.org), to support the operation and maintenance of the 9.4T Bruker scanner. This post will be embedded within the research teams led by Drs Diana Cash and Marija Petrinovic, and under the supervision of Head of Preclinical MR Physics and Analysis, Dr Eugene Kim.

You will assist users and collaborators with imaging data acquisition, data conversion, quality control, and pre-processing to ensure high-quality data. A key aspect of the role involves implementing, optimizing, evaluating, and applying both routine and novel MR image acquisition and analysis techniques for preclinical imaging and spectroscopy projects, particularly those focused on central nervous system research.

The candidate will work alongside Prof. Martin Albrecht, Dr. Benjamin Dowling, Dr. Rikke Bjerg Jensen (Royal Holloway University of London) and Dr. Andrea Medrado (Exeter) on establishing social foundations of cryptography in protest settings. In particular, the candidate will work with a multi-disciplinary team of cryptographers (Dowling, Albrecht) and ethnographers (Jensen, Medrado) to understand the security needs of participants in protests, to formalise these needs as cryptographic security notions and to design or analyse cryptographic solutions with respect to these notions.

Applications are invited for a talented and enthusiastic postdoctoral scientist to join Prof Mauro Giacca’s laboratory at the School of Cardiovascular and Metabolic Medicine & Sciences at King’s College London to develop gene editing for the correction of inherited cardiomyopathies. Work will be performed in primary cardiomyocytes from human iPS cells, human living myocardial slices from patients and humanised mouse models with the same mutations as patients. Minimum qualifications are PhD and/or MD with expertise in molecular and cellular biology and prior experience in gene editing, also for different applications. 

We are looking for a research assistant to support the implementation of a research project on the impacts of extreme heat on mental health in vulnerable urban communities and the mitigation of these impacts by different categories of urban green spaces. The methods used include leading-edge spatio-temporal analytics to link high-resolution environmental data with geo-tagged datasets, including electronic medical records and smartphone-based data spanning over 15 years (2008-2023). The project involves the active participation of people with lived experience of mental illness, grassroots organisations, policy and practice experts and industry in all stages of the project.

We are recruiting one highly motivated Postdoctoral Bioinformatician to join King’s College London in a new collaborative research programme. Through comprehensive genomic research that utilises large-scale multi-omics and clinical datasets (including WGS, SNP arrays, Methylation, RNAseq for tens of thousands of individuals), this programme aims to develop and validate machine learning solutions for precision medicine approaches and the early diagnosis of Motor Neurone Disease (MND).

The successful candidate will join a team of neuroscientists and computational experts at the King’s MND Care and Research Centre, where they will have a leading role in developing computational analysis methods and analysing large-scale multi-omics datasets comprising thousands of samples. These posts will be based in Dr Iacoangeli’s bioinformatics team at the Department of Biostatistics and Health Informatics but given the collaborative and multi-disciplinary nature of the programme, the expectation is that they will work closely with other members of the King’s MND Care and Research Centre (Professor Al-Chalabi lead) and Health Informatics unit (Professor Richard Dobson lead).

The Research Associate (RA) will work part-time for 2.5 days per week (50%fte) on a study funded by the NIHR School for Social Care Research, with an opportunity to directly influence health and social care practice. The study’s focus is on developing and evaluating web-based guidance and resources on continence care, for people living with dementia, and for paid homecare staff who support people living with dementia in their own home.

The post holder will be responsible for setting up the study (i.e. obtaining ethical approval) and conducting data review, collection, and evaluation. They will conduct the following tasks: independently undertake a rapid review and narrative synthesis of relevant literature; recruit for and conduct semi-structured qualitative interviews with people living with dementia; undertake qualitative data analysis; facilitate online stakeholder workshops; conduct qualitative evaluation of a web-based resource with people living with dementia; support the development of multimedia resources.

(18) Postdoctoral Fellowship Position

Postdoc Fellowship Position summary/title: Computational Biologist – Research Associate

Deadline : 27 August 2024.

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You will manage and contribute to a wide range of research and evaluation projects related to improving health outcomes for women and children accessing health services in South East London.  Part of the role will be dedicated to managing an ongoing health systems project, including data collection, data analysis, and the preparation of reports, papers and presentations.

We are looking for a qualitative researcher with experience of working in a transdisciplinary team and managing research and evaluation projects. The post-holder will oversee the day-to-day implementation of the Resilient Health Systems (RHS) project which aims to understand the resilience capacities of the South East London health system. They will have a key role in managing the RHS project, including designing evaluation projects, undertaking data collection and data analysis, and preparing reports, papers and presentations.

This is an exciting opportunity for a postdoctoral research associate to join our interdisciplinary team to study the role of co-stimulatory domains in the regulation of therapeutic (chimeric antigen receptor) CAR T cells. The aim of this MRC funded project is to improve adoptive cell therapy by specifically modulating the metabolism and therefore function of CAR-T cells.

Cancer immunotherapy using adoptive transfer of CAR T cells lies at the forefront of emerging therapeutic strategies and has achieved unprecedented success in the treatment of relapsed/refractory haematological malignancies. However, only half of the patients currently treated achieve a complete response and unfortunately success has not yet translated to the treatment of solid tumours. Challenges to success include the development of T cell exhaustion.

Building on our findings that metabolic programming is vital for supporting CAR-T cell effector function we will profile CAR-T cell metabolic and functional features in a cohort of patients treated with different CAR-constructs to develop strategies for enhancing CAR T cell efficacy.

We are looking for a highly self-motivated and positive individual, who is enthusiastic about fundamental and translational research and thrives working in a team. You will bring previous experience in cellular immunology, preferably in T cell immunology and a good understanding of cellular metabolic pathways, with some practical experience of techniques to investigate these, which could include metabolic flux analysis, carbon tracing, metabolomics and others. You are enthusiastic about advanced therapies, and thus have acquired insight into CAR-T cell therapies either as part of your previous research or through self-directed learning.

This is an exciting opportunity to be part of a new Wellcome Trust funded Discovery Award to examine prediction of clinical outcome. A key psychological mechanism that maintains anxiety is the tendency to generate negative interpretations of unclear or ambiguous information (known as interpretation bias). We have developed a novel online intervention using cognitive bias modification of interpretations (CBM-I) to ‘train’ people with anxiety problems to develop a more helpful cognitive bias to generate positive interpretations, which effectively reduces anxiety and depression. This low-intensity intervention is straightforward, accessible and can be offered at scale. In the current project we will use cognitive, genetic, clinical and demographic information to predict clinical outcome at the end of the CBM-I intervention and at follow up. This is something people with lived of anxiety have told us that they would like, to help inform their decisions selecting a treatment option. 

We are seeking an ambitious and motivated Neuroscientist to join our multidisciplinary team in a pioneering MRC funded project exploring the early development of activity in the brain in newborn infants using ultra-high field (7 Telsa) MRI.

The primary focus of this role will be to conduct experiments in the highly specialized area of ultrahigh field fMRI with neonates. You will work as part of a team including clinicians, neuroscientists, engineers and computer scientists, engaged with studying the early developing brain with previously unprecedented precision.

The post holder must have a good understanding of ultra-high field fMRI, developmental neuroscience and be experienced with fMRI analysis including studying laminar specific responses. Experience of working in multidisciplinary teams and working with neonates are also essential.

The candidate will be involved in the laboratory organisation duties, such as organisation of lab/cell stocks, ordering of consumables, formulating/aliquoting of reagents in parallel of the research project. The research project involves Magnetic Resonance Elastography applied to 3D tissue models. Therefore, the candidate needs to be familiar with both physics applied to Magnetic Resonance Imaging and especially elastography, and 3D tissue models. The research project involves handling organoids, tissue slices and cancer on the chip among the 3D tissue models. We need an organized and flexible candidate, as imaging optimization on the MRI will take place in the faculty of Bichat (Paris, France), and Data collection and handling the sample, on another hand, will be in London, at New Hunt’s house or the Crick institute.

We are looking for a highly motivated Research Assistant to join Professor Tomoki Arichi’s Perinatal Functional Imaging Group in the Research Department of Early Life Imaging, School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences, King’s College London. You will join a dynamic and successful multi-disciplinary team with access to both cutting-edge imaging facilities and world-renowned expertise, to work on an MRC funded senior fellowship exploring the development of the human cortex with advanced MR methods.

The post-holder will work with a novel MR-compatible Virtual Reality (VR) system developed by the team which has been specifically designed to help children tolerate the challenging process of having an MRI scan and will enable new studies of the brain processing underlying early cognitive development. The post-holder will by help design experiments for fMRI studies, collect data from children, and analyse the resulting data to explore the brain processing underlying social cognition.

This is an exciting opportunity for a highly motivated and experienced researcher with expertise in evidence synthesis (mixed methods) and health services.

The appointed researcher will work on a national study in patient safety looking at Epistemic Exclusion and Patient Safety Participation, aimed at improving decision-making in patient safety for a wider diversity of groups and particularly for those from racialised backgrounds, people with mental health challenges or learning disabilities, who are more likely to experience healthcare harm.

We are seeking a researcher with previous experience in the fabrication, optical characterisation and chemical applications of chiral plasmonic nanoparticles. A successful candidate will be working on the EPSRC funded project Catalytic Plasmonics and will collaborate with the project partners at Imperial College London and UK Catalysis Hub. Furthermore, the role holder will be responsible for the supervision of PhD and MSc students working on the relevant topics with the project. It is an excellent opportunity for a researcher to further their skill set in a rapidly advancing field, as well as providing opportunities to manage and take responsibility for both research tasks and people. 

We are seeking a researcher with previous experience in the fabrication, optical characterisation and chemical applications of chiral plasmonic nanoparticles. A successful candidate will be working on the EPSRC funded project Metamaterials in four dimensions, in particular on the investigations of the role on nonlinear effects in ultrafast polarisation and pulse shaping. They will collaborate with the project partners at Imperial College London and University of Exeter. Furthermore, the role holder will be responsible for the supervision of PhD and MSc students working on the relevant topics with the project. It is an excellent opportunity for a researcher to further their skill set in a rapidly advancing field, as well as providing opportunities to manage and take responsibility for both research tasks and people.