Principal Scientific Lead - Biophotonics & Data Analytics

• Full-time

Join iLOF to lead the science that turns optical measurements of blood plasma into reliable, clinically useful biomarkers. Our Optomics® platform combines spectroscopy and AI to detect disease signatures in a blood sample, and we are moving from research towards validated tests.

Our hardest problem sits at the interface between physics and data: extracting real biological signal from noisy, liquid-phase spectra (FTIR, Raman and related techniques) when there are thousands of spectral features but only a few hundred precious patient samples. Solving it well decides whether our models generalise to new patients, sites and instruments.

As Principal Scientific Lead you will own that problem. You will set how iLoF acquires, cleans, models and validates spectral data, act as the senior scientific authority across our physics, data science, biology and hardware teams, and work directly with the Head of Innovation on iLoF's technical direction and longer-term technology bets.

Set iLoF's standards for preprocessing, modelling and validation of spectral data in high-dimensional, small-sample settings (p ≫ n, typically N < 200 per cohort).

Choose and develop the right methods: chemometrics and dimensionality reduction (e. g. PLS, PCA, wavelets, regularised and Bayesian models), and, where the data support it, physics-informed, self-supervised, metric-learning and transfer-learning approaches.

Design data augmentation and domain-adaptation strategies, including physically grounded synthetic spectra, that expand training data without introducing bias or leakage.

Decide when a model is scientifically ready to move forward: review validation, robustness across batches, sites and instruments, and the risk of overfitting.

Interpret raw optical signatures from plasma and nanoparticle samples; diagnose artefacts such as baseline drift, autofluorescence, scattering and instrument variability.

Be the technical bridge between hardware, data science and biology: check physical variables (integration time, laser stability, detector noise) before algorithmic fixes.

Design experiments (DoE) and lab protocols so every measurement is information-rich and scarce clinical samples are used well.

Mentor scientists and data scientists on the physics of the data and on rigorous experimental practice.

Lead the scientific relationship with CROs, contractors and academic groups: write technical statements of work, set data and code standards, and review what comes back.

Work peer-to-peer with university principal investigators and keep collaborations aligned with iLoF's timelines.

Make sure data and code shared externally protects iLoF's IP, working with our data protection lead.

You will report to and work directly with iLoF's Head of Innovation as their senior scientific partner: shaping the technology roadmap, testing long-term technology bets, and taking scientific decisions within your remit with a high degree of autonomy. The role is designed to grow into technical executive leadership.

You combine the mathematical depth of a machine learning scientist with the physical intuition of a spectroscopist. You are as comfortable reading an optics paper or reviewing Python code as you are walking into the lab to look at the instrument. You make sound decisions with incomplete data, explain your reasoning to people from other disciplines, and want to see your work become a clinical product.

PhD in biophotonics, computational physics, chemometrics, applied mathematics or a…