Postdoctoral Research Associate

The Role and Department

You will be working as a Postdoctoral Research Assistant (PDRA) in the Bourne-Worster group, within the Department of Chemistry at Durham University, which is located on the Science Campus, a 10-minute walk away from Durham old town. The post is available for 2.5 years, including a 1-year probation period, ideally starting by March 2026 (although flexibility around this date is possible). The usual starting salary is grade 7, spine point 30 (£38,249 per year before taxes).

A World Top 100 department, the at Durham is one of the very best in the UK, with an outstanding reputation for excellence in research, teaching and employability of our students. 96% of our research outputs were rated world-leading or internationally excellent in the latest UK-wide review (REF 2021). Our Chemistry degree is among the best in the UK (5^th in the Complete University Guide 2024, 10^th in The Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide 2023, and 11^th in the Guardian University Guide 2024). We are an active and vibrant department, w ith a strong cohort of early career academics and future leaders.

As a PDRA in computational chemistry at Durham, you will have access to state-of-the-art instrumentation and facilities, including Durham’s High-Performance Computer, Hamilton (15,616 CPU cores, 36TB RAM and 1.9PB disk space). As part of the Northern 8 cluster, members of Durham University can also submit projects to the Tier 2 supercomputer Bede (32 IBM Power 9 dual-CPU nodes, each with 4 NVIDIA V100 GPUs and high performance interconnect). The is also well-provisioned with computational resources and you will be able to carry out much of your routine work on our two new dedicated server machines (each 64 CPU cores, NVIDIA Tesla A30 GPU unit, 384GB RAM and over 24TB storage).

The Role

This post is fixed term for 30 months, in line with funding awarded to the PI as part of her Royal Society University Research Fellowship.

You will be employed to work on research that will be led by the Principal Investigator (PI). Whilst this means that you will not be carrying out independent research in your own right, the expectation is that you will contribute to the advancement of the project, through the development of your own research ideas/adaptation and development of research protocols.

Successful applicants will, ideally, be in post by March 2026, although flexibility around this date is possible.

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