Research Assistant, PREDICTS Database Assistant

About Us

We are a world-class visitor attraction and leading science research centre. We use the Museum's unique collections and our unrivalled expertise to tackle the biggest challenges facing the world today. We care for more than 80 million objects spanning billions of years and welcome more than five million visitors annually and 16 million visits to our website.

Today the Museum is more relevant and influential than ever. By attracting people from a range of backgrounds to work for us, we can continue to look at the world with fresh eyes and find new ways of doing things.

We employ 1100 staff in a variety of roles, all united by our vision of a future where people and planet thrive. We need everyone to have the passion and drive to help us with our mission to create advocates for our planet and inspire millions to care about the natural world.

Our vision is of a future where both people and the planet thrive. Diversity is one of our core values and we strive to build a workplace where everyone feels a sense of belonging. All new staff who join us learn about the importance of diversity and inclusion to the Museum and how to contribute to creating an inclusive environment.

We know we have more to do, but we are committed to ensuring that everyone who works at the Museum feels they can thrive and feel valued and respected.

The Natural History Museum maintains the PREDICTS (Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems) database; the world’s largest global database describing how local terrestrial biodiversity response to land use and related human pressures. The database underpins high-impact academic research and applied work with policy and business partners, and its value depends critically on the quality, completeness and traceability of the underlying data.

We are seeking a Research Assistant, ideally with an MSc-level background in ecology, biodiversity, environmental science or a related discipline, to support the ongoing expansion and curation of the PREDICTS database. The postholder will work closely with members of the PREDICTS team to identify relevant scientific studies, obtain raw data from papers or from corresponding with their authors, and curate those data into the PREDICTS database following established protocols.

This exciting role in a rapidly-growing field is ideal for someone who enjoys careful, detail-oriented work with scientific data, is comfortable engaging directly with the academic literature and research community and can manage complex information streams in a systematic and organised way.

The postholder will be based within a collaborative and inclusive research environment within the Biodiversity Futures Lab, led by Professor Andy Purvis and Dr Adriana De Palma. They will work alongside a diverse group of researchers spanning ecology, biodiversity modelling, data science and geospatial analysis. In addition to their core data-curation responsibilities, there will be opportunities to engage in wider ongoing work in the lab, depending on interests and capacity.

The postholder will also have opportunities for informal training and skills development, including to areas such as AI-assisted literature discovery, coding in the R language for data manipulation, statistical modelling and geospatial analysis.

You're passionate about biodiversity science and love working with data that can make a real difference in how the world understands and protects nature. Curious, organised and highly detail-oriented, you enjoy digging into scientific literature, uncovering valuable insights and transforming complex information into robust, high-quality datasets. Whether you've recently completed an MSc or have equivalent experience, you bring a strong foundation in ecology, biodiversity, environmental science or a related field.

You're comfortable reading and interpreting scientific papers, thinking critically about research methods and results, and engaging confidently with the academic community. You thrive when working with large volumes of information, keeping track of multiple projects, datasets and communications without losing sight of the details. Accuracy matters to you, and you take pride in producing work that is thorough, reproducible and trusted by others.

A proactive self-starter, you're equally happy working independently or collaborating as part of a multidisciplinary research team. You enjoy solving problems, improving processes and finding better ways to manage and curate scientific data. Experience with ecological datasets, evidence synthesis, systematic reviews, meta-analyses, R, or emerging AI-assisted research tools would be a bonus. But above all, we're looking for someone with intellectual curiosity, a passion for biodiversity research, and a desire to contribute to one of the world's most influential environmental data resources.

You'll be joining the team behind PREDICTS, the world's…