Research Associate in Bioinformatics - INTERNAL ONLY

King's College London, United Kingdom

Updated: 10 days ago
Location: Harrow N W and S, ENGLAND
Deadline: 16 Apr 2025

THIS VACANCY IS OPEN TO INTERNAL APPLICANTS ONLY
About Us

The Faculty of Life Sciences & Medicine at King’s College London seeks to appoint a Research Associate in Bioinformatics.

(Pharos AI) in the Comprehensive Cancer Centre, which is the academic arm of one of the leading cancer centres in Europe bringing together world-class clinical services delivered by our NHS partners, with research and education for the benefit of cancer patients in South East London and beyond. 

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About PharosAI

PharosAI offers a unique cancer AI product development ecosystem for drug discovery and clinical applications, democratising access to data, AI assets, technologies, and capabilities. PharosAI unites large-scale multimodal cancer datasets with AI models through a highly-secure, trusted, federated platform, offering state-of-the-art AI tooling for use by pharma/biotech/life-sciences, AI-pharma, and AI developers of clinical applications, in enterprises, growth companies, and research organisations. PharosAI will also provide a “lend me an expert” concierge service, training and education in AI for clinicians, and an end-to-end product development and deployment service, helping cancer pathology services to be more easily deployed within the NHS. This will be facilitated by a best-in-class patient involvement and governance model, and fair value sharing for data providers.

PharosAI will revolutionise AI-powered cancer care, driving breakthrough therapies, clinical applications, addressing cancer’s social determinants, lowering barriers to UK SMEs, catalysing innovation and positioning the UK as a global leader in this dynamic ecosystem.

PharosAI is a joint venture between two leading research-intensive universities, King’s College London and Queen Mary University of London; and two innovative NHS Trusts, Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust and Barts Health Trust. PharosAI has been awarded £18.9M in funding from the Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology, and cash and in-kind contributions bringing the total funding to £44M.


About the role

We are seeking a highly motivated computer scientist to oversee the consolidation, harmonisation and data integration of clinical, molecular, digital pathology data as well as medical imaging data for hosting on the PharosAI platform. The postholder will liaise with bioinformaticians, data scientists, ML researchers, biobankers, clinicians, cancer researchers and engineering teams and lab technicians to develop processes and methods for collection, preprocessing integration, access and storage of research datasets hosted in PharosAI. Plan and deliver data management initiatives to address retrospective and prospective data for legacy cohorts.

This is a full time role and you will be offered a fixed term contract until 31 March 2027.


About You

To be successful in this role, we are looking for candidates to have the following skills and experience:

Essential criteria

  • A PhD degree in Bioinformatics, Data Science, Computational Biology, Computer Science, or a related field *
  • Strong understanding of molecular data analyses, including genomics, single cell and spatial transcriptomics  
  • Strong understanding of digital pathology data and machine learning and AI-based approaches 
  • Ability to identify inefficiencies in data request workflows, database structures, or system integrations, and proactively implement solutions 
  • Organise large scale data storage 
  • Experience with data harmonisation across site specific data schemas and metadata catalogues. of data across all data modalities  
  • Experience in analytical approaches large-scale data preprocessing 
  • Experience with engineering to scale and enhance database capabilities as data volume grows 

    • *  Please note that this is a PhD level role but candidates who have submitted their thesis and are awaiting award of their PhDs will be considered. In these circumstances the appointment will be made at Grade 5, spine point 30 with the title of Research Assistant. Upon confirmation of the award of the PhD, the job title will become Research Associate and the salary will increase to Grade 6

    Desirable criteria

  • Understanding of the KHP CancerBiobank 
  • Understanding of the Guy’s Cancer Clinical database 
  • Understanding of the Breast Cancer Now TissueBank 
  • Has presented findings in internal meetings, scientific conferences, and publications. 
  • Has experience in dashboards and reports on data request trends, database performance, and user activity 

    • Downloading a copy of our Job Description

    Full details of the role and the skills, knowledge and experience required can be found in the Job Description document, provided at the bottom of the next page after you click “Apply Now.” This document will provide information of what criteria will be assessed at each stage of the recruitment process.


    Further Information

    We pride ourselves on being inclusive and welcoming. We embrace diversity and want everyone to feel that they belong and are connected to others in our community.

    We are committed to working with our staff and unions on these and other issues, to continue to support our people and to develop a diverse and inclusive culture at King's. We ask all candidates to submit a copy of their CV, and a supporting statement, detailing how they meet the essential criteria listed in the advert. If we receive a strong field of candidates, we may use the desirable criteria to choose our final shortlist, so please include your evidence against these where possible.

    To find out how our managers will review your application, please take a look at our ‘How we Recruit ’ pages.

    Interviews are due to be held: TBC

    We are able to offer sponsorship for candidates who do not currently possess the right to work in the UK.


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