Salary: £32,546 - £55,755 per annum
Newcastle University is a great place to work, with excellent benefits. We have a generous holiday package; plus the opportunity to buy more, great pension schemes and a number of health and wellbeing initiatives to support you.
Closing Date: 07 May 2025
The role
The Environmental Biotechnology Innovation Centre (EBIC), which ICOS is a member of, brings together scientists from ten leading UK institutions in a mission to engineer the properties and functions of micro-organisms, creating more effective ways to monitor the environment and remove pollutants. The Cyanobacteria Engineering for Restoring Environments (CYBER) project aims to develop the foundational multidisciplinary tools needed to de-risk environmentally focused engineering biology and ultimately support its future deployment into real-world ecosystems.
We are looking for a synthetic biologist with computational and experimental experience interested in applying their expertise into Biosecurity and DNA data storage. You will join our consortium dedicated to the mission of restoring natural environments by engineering microbial machines. Working at the forefront of information & coding theory and cryptography together with molecular biologists and engineering biologists we will engineer microorganisms as devices to deliver environmental solutions that are cryptographically biosecured by design. Our goal is to ensure the utmost safety and traceability using genomic barcoding, watermarking and other cryptographic and DNA data encoding techniques for engineered organisms before deploying them into complex ecosystems. You will have the opportunity to work closely with experimentalist and have access to state-of-the-art computational and bio-nano-technology equipment to test, debug and improve their theories in living organisms.
You will be able to spend time away from Newcastle visiting collaborators' labs in the UK and abroad and attending business meetings outside Newcastle, including international conferences and meetings.
To have a conversation about the opportunity, please contact Professor Natalio Krasnogor at Natalio.Krasnogor@newcastle.ac.uk.
For more information about the School of Computing, please click here
For more information about our research, please click here
This is a full-time, fixed-term position starting immediately for a duration of 24 months, with the potential for extension.
To apply, please complete an online application and upload a plain text copy of your CV and covering letter only. In your covering letter, you should evidence how you meet or exceed the essential and desirable requirements for the role. Please note, any other ‘Additional Document’ you upload may not be received by the reviewing panel.
As part of our commitment to career development for research colleagues, the University has developed 3 levels of research role profiles. These profiles set out firstly the generic competences and responsibilities expected of role holders at each level and secondly the general qualifications and experiences needed for entry at a particular level.
Key Accountabilities
For Research Assistants, Research Associates and Senior Research Associates:
1. Design, implementation, test and debug information theory, coding, and cryptographic schemes for reliably and securely storing data (e.g. barcodes, watermarks, etc) in living organisms and improve their biosecurity
2. Consider the state of the art in error correction techniques in DNA synthesis, DNA sequencing, DNA data storage as well as naturally occurring mutation types and rates to improve biosecurity schemes
3. Develop conceptual and computational frameworks to evaluate the effectiveness of the various schemes developed in 1 & 2 under different realistic experimental in vitro, in vivo and environmental conditions
4. Collaborate with molecular biologists and engineering biologists in the design of wet-lab experiments to validate, debug and improve all of the above
5. Improve the algorithms and tools used or developed in 1,2,3 & 4 above based on experimental data obtained
6. Following and establishing good software engineering practices within the project and across the research group's projects (e.g. via use of version control system)
7. Contribution to writing scientific papers
8. Oral presentations at meetings, workshops and conferences
For Research Associates and Senior Research Associates only:
9. Contribute to grant writing
10. Support our group’s social scientist with regards to Responsible Research and Innovation. Contribute also with the public communication of the project’s science
11. Demonstrable contribution to computational synthetic biology (or related) code repositories
The role will require regular liaison with the other investigators in the project (specifically), the research group (generally) and international collaborators, to keep excellent records of all the activities conducted whether these are theoretical, computational experiments, procedures, protocols, workflows and outcomes, enabling reuse, interpretation with team members and delivery of project milestones.
The Person (Essential)
Knowledge, Skills and Experience
Essential for Research Assistants, Research Associates and Senior Research Associates:
• Demonstrable experience in both computational and experimental synthetic biology
• Publication of work in peer-reviewed in relevant conferences and/or journals for the above
• Demonstrable experience in a microbiology laboratory running, e.g., cloning and transformation experiments, bacteria culturing, microscopy, etc.
• Molecular biology, Synthetic Biology or Biotechnology familiarity
• Demonstrable expertise in Java, Ruby, Python or C/ C++ programming
• Competence in Linux or OS X programming environments
• Software version control system (e.g. Git, GitHub, Bitbucket, etc)
Desirable
• Bioinformatics experience
• Coding theory or Information theory or Cryptography
• Laboratory automation
• Biosecurity experience
• DNA data storage experience
• Molecular computation, e.g. DNA computing, or molecular fabrication, e.g. DNA or RNA origami techniques or other DNA & RNA programmable self-assembly, etc.
• Presentation of work at scientific meetings
Additionally for Research Associates and Senior Research Associates:
• Experience contributing to grant writing
• Experience in the utilisation and development of social media for public dissemination
Attributes and Behaviour
Essential for Research Assistants, Research Associates and Senior Research Associates:
• An ability to communicate effectively via oral and written media (e.g technical reports, papers, presentations)
• Capacity for original thought and self-driven
• Enthusiastic, hardworking, team player and goal-setter
• Ability to interact with people from different disciplines
• Punctual and generally dependable
• Keen and motivated to work across disciplinary fields
Desirable for Research Associates and Senior Research Associates
• Communication skills with the public
• Ability to supervise student projects
Qualifications
• An undergraduate degree in computer science, engineering, mathematics, or related fields (Research Assistant)
• A PhD degree in a suitable field (Research Associates and Senior Research associates) or closely to complete (Research Assistant)
Newcastle University is a global University where everyone is treated with dignity and respect. As a University of Sanctuary, we aim to provide a welcoming place of safety for all, offering opportunities to people fleeing violence and persecution.
We are committed to being a fully inclusive university which actively recruits, supports and retains colleagues from all sectors of society. We value diversity as well as celebrate, support and thrive on the contributions of all of our employees and the communities they represent. We are proud to be an equal opportunities employer and encourage applications from individuals who can complement our existing teams, we believe that success is built on having teams whose backgrounds and experiences reflect the diversity of our university and student population.
At Newcastle University we hold a silver Athena Swan award in recognition of our good employment practices for the advancement of gender equality. We also hold a Race Equality Charter Bronze award in recognition of our work towards tackling race inequality in higher education REC. We are a Disability Confident employer and will offer an interview to disabled applicants who meet the essential criteria for the role as part of the offer and interview scheme.
In addition, we are a member of the Euraxess initiative supporting researchers in Europe.
Requisition ID: 28049