Postdoctoral Research Fellow; Spinck Lab - Generative Biology Institute England, Unite

At the Ellison Institute of Technology (EIT), we’re on a mission to translate scientific discovery into real world impact. We bring together visionary scientists, technologists, engineers, researchers, educators and innovators to tackle humanity’s greatest challenges in four transformative areas:

• Health, Medical Science & Generative Biology
• Food Security & Sustainable Agriculture
• Climate Change & Managing CO₂
• Artificial Intelligence & Robotics

This is ambitious work - work that demands curiosity, courage, and a relentless drive to make a difference. At EIT, you’ll join a community built on excellence, innovation, tenacity, trust, and collaboration, where bold ideas become real-world breakthroughs. Together, we push boundaries, embrace complexity, and create solutions to scale ideas from lab to society.

Led by Founding Director Jason Chin, the Generative Biology Institute (GBI) at the Ellison Institute of Technology is tackling the key challenges in making biology engineerable, and thereby unlocking the unrivalled power of biology for the benefit of humanity.

The vision of the GBI is to lay the foundations for engineering biology, and unlock its potential for good. To achieve this, we must overcome two key challenges. First, we need the ability to write in the natural language of biology, enabling the rapid and scalable synthesis of entire genomes with precision. Second, we must understand what to write - determining which DNA sequences will generate biological systems that perform the desired functions.

Addressing these challenges will allow us to harness the full power of biology to create transformative solutions across health, agriculture, clean energy and more.

The Generative Biology Institute commenced operations in 2025, occupying newly renovated bespoke space in the Oxford Science Park. The team will later move to a purpose‑made facility in the Oxford Science Park, currently under construction. Once complete, this state‑of‑the‑art facility will include more than 40,000 m² of research laboratory and office space. It will house over 30 groups and up to 600 employees at scale, focused on solving the two critical challenges in making biology engineerable and applying the solutions to addressing the global challenges encapsulated in EIT’s Humane Endeavours.

We are seeking ambitious, creative, and highly skilled Postdoctoral Researchers to join the Spinck Lab  Spinck Lab, led by Principal Investigator Martin Spinck, aims to explore biological evolution in artificial environments to uncover new-to-nature functions, focusing on evolvable self‑assembling biomaterials and their applications in sustainable chemistry and biotechnology. In particular, using the synthetic 61‑codon strain Syn
61, in which three codons have been deleted and can be reassigned to encode non‑canonical amino acids (ncAAs). By utilizing the reprogrammable genetic code of Syn
61, we gain access to a vast new chemical space for discovering biological catalysts and materials with potential for optimization through directed evolution.

Postdoctoral candidates should have experience in synthetic or chemical biology and/or microbiology, ideally with hands‑on work using

E. coli as a model organism. Experience in techniques such as molecular cloning and genetic engineering is expected. Prior experience with directed evolution approaches, including library design, mutagenesis, and the development of screening or selection strategies, would be particularly advantageous. Familiarity with the incorporation of non‑canonical amino acids, the characterization of biomaterials, or enzyme kinetics would be beneficial but is not required.

Candidates should be excited to work at the interface of biology and chemistry and motivated to develop and apply experimental approaches to evolve new biomolecular functions, working to gather data that is missing from current models of DNA function, use these data to develop new frameworks that predict synthetic DNA behaviour inside cells, and apply these engineering tools and computational models to create mammalian chromosomes with defined functional…