Super Resolution Microscopist

Salary: £46,700 - £51,370 per annum (dependent on skills and experience)

Contract Type: Fixed Term (2 years)

Hours: Full time

Location: Science and Technology Facilities Council, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Harwell, Oxfordshire

Come and do the kind of science that made you want to become a scientist. Explore the unknown and get to grips with the biggest challenges in Big Science. And, alongside world class engineers and technologists, use everything you've learnt to find real-answers that shape society and improve lives.

Put simply, discover the kind of impact you can make when you work with some of the best facilities and brightest scientists in the world.

The Central Laser Facility (CLF), part of the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), provides advanced laser research facilities for UK and international scientists.

We have an exciting opportunity to join a team of multidisciplinary experts at the Octopus imaging cluster within CLF to develop new imaging techniques and instrumentation to correlate light based and electron based methods of imaging biological samples.

This frontier area of science is vitally important for the UK to retain leadership in biomedical science and biological physics. The successful candidate will develop ground breaking light microscopy methods and technology to enable breakthroughs in biomedical research. Octopus is a UK national facility with a suite of advanced laser-based imaging and laser trapping capabilities.

The current focus in Octopus is cryo-correlative light and electron microscopy (CLEM) and we are recruiting light and electron microscopy scientists to lead new physics techniques to push structural biology to study proteins in their cellular context.

About the Role

As part of its pioneering cryo-CLEM development programme, Octopus is now seeking a scientist with a background in super resolution microscopy to join the OCTOPUS cryogenic microscopy team on a fixed term contract.

Your primary responsibility will be to operate and maintain cryogenic optical super resolution microscopes and support facility users in their cryo-CLEM workflows. You will work closely with staff scientists with over five years of cryogenic fluorescence microscopy experience and with partners on the Harwell Campus.

You will be working in a facility environment which hosts academic and industrial users from across the UK and EU. You will be encouraged to maintain and develop collaborations to sustain your own scientific research, to write papers, apply for facility beam-time or grants, and to attend and present at conferences.

About You

We are looking for an experimentalist, with a PhD in physics or optical engineering (or equivalent relevant experience), and you will have a track record operating optical-based wide-field or scanning based super-resolution microscopes.

It would be helpful to have experience designing and developing data acquisition and instrument control software, and have proficiencies in LabVIEW, Python or Micro-Manager or other relevant programming environments, and have experience safely working with open-beam lasers in a laboratory environment.

We expect you to have postdoctoral experience (or other relevant employment experience) and a track record of publication in peer-reviewed journals.

What we offer

We are offering a fixed term position with a whole host of benefits including:

• 30 days holiday annually (in addition to 10.5 bank holidays and privilege days)
• flexible working hours
• an excellent defined average salary pension scheme
• employee shopping/travel discounts
• excellent learning and development opportunities
• visa Sponsorship for candidates applying outside of the UK

Plus many more benefits and wellbeing initiatives that enable our employees to have a great work life balance!

UKRI is an Equal Opportunity & Disability Confident Employer.

We ask some of the biggest questions in the universe, to answer some of the biggest challenges in the world. Together, our scientists, technologists, engineers and business support team explore the unknown across every field you could think of. And they turn what they find into work that changes the world around us.

What could you achieve with the world-leading facilities and experts of one of Europe's largest research organisations by your side? Join us and discover what's possible.

Closing Date: 29^th October 2023