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.
This is an opportunity to join a team of multidisciplinary experts at the Octopus imaging facility 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 cutting-edge electron and 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, such as super-resolution microscopy (including, SIM, STED, MINFLUX and AiryScan, and STORM at both room and cryogenic temperatures), multidimensional single molecule imaging and tracking, confocal microscopy, light microscopy, and focused ion beam scanning electron microscopy for life, environmental, and materials sciences. These microscope techniques are developed and operated collaboratively by a team of physicists, life scientists, and computational scientists. 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.
Octopus is part of the Central Laser Facility (CLF), based Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL), a world leading laser centre providing scientists mainly from the UK and continental Europe with access to an unparalleled range of pioneering laser technology. The CLF has around 190 staff and its function – user facility, international research – makes it a very friendly, outgoing, externally facing sort of place. It has a welcoming and inclusive culture, and you will find that people will naturally help and support you.
Our host organisation, the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) is one of Europe’s largest research organisations and operates at a number of sites within the UK. RAL is home to about 1,200 staff that work with a community of more than 10,000 scientists and engineers mainly from the research sector, which spans the scientific spectrum including energy, security, materials healthcare, life-sciences and the environment to address important challenges facing society.
STFC is an award winning employer and RAL is a superb place to work – there is pioneering work going on all around the site and the environment, facilities and conditions are excellent. RAL has a real buzz and the people working here have a profound sense of pride in what they achieve.
About the Role
As part of its state-of-the-art cryo-CLEM development programme, Octopus is now seeking a scientist with a background in electron microscopy to join our cryogenic microscopy team on a fixed term contract. Your primary responsibility will be to design, develop, and commission unique instrumentation and workflows for cryo-CLEM, interfacing EM with our world class cryo-fluorescence based microscope techniques. You will work closely with staff scientists with over five years of cryogenic fluorescence microscopy experience and with partners on the Harwell Campus, including CLF Target Fabrication, Scientific Computing Department Machine Learning (SCDML) and electron Bio-Imaging Centre (eBIC). The microscopes are primarily used by internationally leading groups in life sciences research ranging from virology to oncogenic cell signalling and fundamental biology.
You will be working in a facility environment which hosts academic and industrial collaborations from across the UK and EU. You will be encouraged to maintain and develop new collaborations to sustain your own scientific research, to write papers, apply for facility beam-time or grants, and to attend and present at conferences.
For more information and to apply visit https://www.careersportal.co.uk/UKRI-careers/jobs/electron-microscopist-3295?et=HMjaSfWf