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The Role:
The Institute of Life Sciences and Healthcare at the University of Portsmouth are seeking a driven Senior Research Associate to support the Sequencing and Bioinformatics Laboratory as a dedicated bioinformatician. The successful candidate will have a unique opportunity to work on a range of highly impactful genomics-based projects including clinical and environmental microbiology, translational medical genomics, engineering biology, forensics, and paleogenomics.
This role would suit a highly motivated researcher with interests in bioinformatics, data science and visualisation, design of novel analysis approaches, and development of robust pipelines. The successful candidate will have significant opportunities for involvement with cross-disciplinary research projects within and outside of the University, and opportunities to develop a research portfolio of their own.
Whilst we work with data from all sequencing providers, we provide in-house sequencing using Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) platforms (MinION, GridION, PromethION P2 Solo, Voltrax). The preferred candidate will demonstrate experience and expertise working with data generated using this cutting-edge technology.
Working under the guidance of the research leader, the SRA will support these projects through a range of activities, including providing dedicated bioinformatics support to users of the facilities (including staff, research students, and external partners), management of requirements for upcoming and existing projects, providing general bioinformatics support and training across the department to facilitate R&I growth, management of data from the ONT sequencers, processing and management of data from sequencing experiments using existing pipelines, development of pipelines and databases in light of updated tools in the literature, management and use of the bioinformatics high performance computing (HPC) server, design of experiments, quality control analyses, qualitative and/or quantitative data collection and bioinformatics analysis, monitoring changes in the field with potential application to research across the laboratory, identification of potential opportunities for collaborative work or grants, and taking a contributing and leading role in the writing of research manuscripts.
The postholder will contribute to the conduct of the research projects, undertake design and implementation of sequencing experiments, and contribute to the analysis of the data in conjunction with other members of the project team. You may be required to manage the progress of the project in line with the project terms of reference. The postholder will contribute to writing papers for research journals and material for publications and to the growing research culture and wider academic work of the School.
The interviews are currently anticipated to be held on 29 September 2026.
This appointment is a fixed-term contract until 30 April 2028.
For internal candidates it may be possible to apply for this role under the Secondment Policy . If you wish to apply as a secondee, you must have approval of your line manager in advance of submitting your application form. Please confirm in your application that your line manager has approved this.
If you have any queries regarding this position, please Professor Sam Robson at
[email protected]
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