Senior Bioinformatician

Southampton Clinical Trials Unit

Are you a bioinformatician with the experience to take on a senior role within a Cancer Research UK Clinical Trials Unit?

The Southampton Clinical Trials Unit (SCTU) has a rare and exciting opportunity to join our team as a Senior Bioinformatician as we look to establish and develop collaborations between our clinical trials and the discovery community.  

In this role you will be working within a leading UK academic clinical trials unit, with expertise in the design, conduct and publication of clinical trials and other well-designed studies from first-in-human phase I to practice change phase III trials to large early diagnosis observational studies with rich translational data. 

Working to Cancer Research UKs (CRUK) strategy to “include discovery in the heart of everything we do” the successful candidate will establish and lead the bioinformatics portfolio of work within SCTU and contribute to the planned strategic development of bioinformatics within SCTU over the coming years.

The post holder will join a team of over 100 SCTU staff and will work closely with the translational, secure data environment and statistical teams with the primary purpose to generate new hypotheses for future biomarker-guided clinical trials to be developed by SCTU. 

As a new area of activity at SCTU it is essential the post holder has the ability to establish and grow bioinformatics activity and lead the SCTU bioinformatics team when new staff join the unit (i.e. we have secured funding for an additional bioinformatician post within 2 years of starting and the post holder will be responsible  for costing additional posts into SCTU trial funding proposals). Although when starting the post holder may be the only Bioinformatician in SCTU they will undertake computational biology research in close liaison and linkage with the bioinformaticians within the nearly created Faculty of Medicine Bioinformatics Research Facility (Bio-R).

As an employee of the University of Southampton you will enjoy a competitive salary and a generous benefits package which includes:

• A generous holiday entitlement, including bank holidays and university closure days per year.
• Qualification for the USS pension scheme, with a large employer contributions to your pension. 
• Employee benefits such as the access to the Cycle to Work Scheme, the new Low Emissions Car Scheme, and University discounts at hundreds of shops, services and businesses across the south.

Having a PhD or equivalent professional qualifications in mathematics, bioinformatics and/or computational biology AND significant experience within bioinformatics and/or computational biology, systems biology and/or machine learning is essential. Having worked within a CTU is desirable but not essential. 

This position is offered on a full time, fixed term basis for 60 months. 

The Southampton Clinical Trials Unit is a UKCRC registered CTU and is core-funded by Cancer Research UK (CRUK) together with funding from the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) via the Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) and Research Support Service (RSS). We are located within the state-of-the-art Centre for Cancer Immunology building at Southampton General Hospital. 

As part of the CRUK infrastructure we have close working relationships with our partners, including the Experimental Cancer Research Centre, the Centre for Cancer Immunology discovery community and CRUK Centres and Institutes across the UK. 

For informal queries please contact Dr Victoria Goss, Head of Early Diagnosis and Translational Group, V.M.Goss@soton.ac.uk

Further details:

• Job Description and Person Specification