Research Associate - Specialism in Bioinformatics with Potential Wetlab Experience

Do you have a passion for using bioinformatics to understand immunology, RNA and gene regulation? We have an exciting opportunity for a Research Associate to join an ambitious, interdisciplinary programme investigating how RNA regulation controls innate immune responses during inflammation and infection.

You'll hold a PhD in bioinformatics, computational biology, molecular biology, genetics or a related field, with a research record analysing high-throughput sequencing data, including RNA-related datasets. You're comfortable working with Python, R or similar languages on UNIX-style systems, and you bring a strong understanding of RNA biology alongside the ability to design, analyse and troubleshoot experiments independently.

While this role is computationally focused, we're keen to hear from candidates who are equally motivated by the wet-lab side of the work. If you have experience running high-throughput RNA-focused experiments as well as analysing the results, you'll thrive here. Experience with CRISPR technologies, transcriptomics, imaging or zebrafish models is a bonus, as is familiarity with GitHub, Jupyter or R Markdown for reproducible analysis.

Most importantly, you're collaborative, curious, and excited to learn new skills as part of a community of researchers working towards shared goals.

You'll join a multidisciplinary team combining primary human immune cell culture, zebrafish models, molecular biology, genomics, bioinformatics and in vivo imaging to investigate how ELAVL1 — a major RNA-binding protein — shapes immune cell biology. Together, you'll uncover the fundamental principles of post-transcriptional immune regulation, with real relevance to inflammatory disease.

Day to day, you'll process and integrate large-scale multi-omics datasets, apply novel statistical and visualisation approaches, and investigate mechanisms such as intron retention, mRNA stability, RNA editing, methylation and phosphorylation. You'll help design and run experiments including RNA-seq, eCLIP, SLAM-seq and RIP-seq, and for the right candidate, there's scope to develop skills in CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing and RNA affinity pull-down assays. You'll also contribute to publications and presentations, and support the training of students and junior researchers along the way.

This is a genuine opportunity to shape a growing research programme, build a broad interdisciplinary skillset spanning wet-lab and computational biology, and make discoveries that matter.

The University of Sheffield is a remarkable place to work. Our people are at the heart of everything we do. Their diverse backgrounds, abilities and beliefs make Sheffield a world-class university.

We offer a fantastic range of benefits including a highly competitive annual leave entitlement (with the ability to purchase more), a generous pensions scheme, flexible working opportunities, a commitment to your development and wellbeing, a wide range of retail discounts, and much more.

Find out more at sheffield.ac.uk/jobs/benefits and join us to become part of something special.

We are committed to exploring flexible working opportunities which benefit the individual and the University.

We build teams of people from different heritages and lifestyles from across the world, whose talent and contributions complement each other to greatest effect. We believe diversity in all its forms delivers greater impact through research, teaching and student experience.

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