Scientist in Advanced Imaging for Women's Health (10412)
Rosalind Franklin Institute
Within Quantitative Biology Across Scales (QBAS) Challenge, you will develop and integrate correlative, multiscale imaging workflows that connect tissue organisation and cellular ultrastructure with molecular structure. These workflows span biological and cryogenic sample preparation, multimodal data acquisition, sample tracking and registration across scales, and data processing, with feedback between biological interpretation, analysis and acquisition to improve robustness, relevance and throughput.
QBAS combines advanced imaging, quantitative analysis and AI to link information from cells, tissues and organs, with a major focus on women’s health. Our primary biological focus is on complex women’s health issues that require multidisciplinary approaches and collaboration across multiple teams. One of our key areas is supporting clinicians in better understanding and characterising reproductive and maternal health, with specific interest in complication during late pregnancy, endometriosis and impact of STD on fertility.
We are looking for an outstanding, curious and collaborative scientist who can help bridge technology development and important biological questions. We welcome candidates from either of two complementary backgrounds: You may be a technology-development scientist with expertise in cryogenic imaging and relevant data processing with a strong motivation to apply and adapt these approaches to women’s health. Alternatively, you may be a leading cellular biologist with expertise in reproductive and maternal health with an excellent understanding of the relevant clinical context and a strong drive to develop and exploit new imaging technologies.
For candidates from a biological background, experience with human tissue, clinically characterised samples or cohorts, pathology, or close interaction with clinical teams would be particularly valuable. You should be able to identify the biological and clinical questions that matter and help translate them into experimentally tractable projects. For candidates from a technology background, deep expertise in advanced imaging or instrumentation and the ability to develop, optimise and integrate new workflows will be particularly important.
In both cases, the role will require a strong interest in working across disciplines and developing expertise beyond your original field. You will work closely with biologists, clinicians, microscopists, engineers and computational scientists to ensure that technology development is driven by meaningful biological questions, while biological studies take full advantage of the advanced technologies available at the Franklin.
You will lead scientific projects within QBAS that bring together important questions in the field of reproductive and maternal health with the development and application of advanced imaging technologies. Depending on your background, you will bring either deep expertise in advanced imaging, in situ structural biology or technology development, or deep biological expertise in the understanding of endometriosis, placenta biology or long-term consequences of infections.
You will work across the interface between biology and technology, helping to define the questions, samples and measurements needed to address clinically relevant problems and translating these into ambitious experimental programmes. This will involve developing and integrating new imaging workflows and bring the biological and clinical insight required to ensure that technology development addresses meaningful questions and is applied to the right models, tissues and patient-derived material.
You will work closely with biologists, clinicians, microscopists, engineers and computational scientists across techniques including volumetric and correlative imaging, X-ray imaging, cryogenic sample preparation, cryo-FIB/SEM and cryo-electron microscopy, together with quantitative image analysis and AI. You will lead the delivery, interpretation and publication of the work, develop external collaborations and funding opportunities, and help translate successful approaches into robust workflows, protocols and capabilities for the wider Franklin community.