Our People and Culture
Life at the Wellcome Sanger Institute is truly unique where collaboration, innovation and support for people as individuals are demonstrated in everything we do. Set across 130 acres, just outside of Cambridge, our people are shaping the future by delivering life-changing science with the reach, scale, and creativity to solve some of humanity’s greatest challenges.
We would not be able to do our research without being able to draw on the diversity of experience, skills and knowledge we have on our Campus. We aim to attract, recruit, retain and develop talent from the widest possible talent pool, thereby gaining insight and access to different markets to generate a greater impact on the world.
Our Behavioural Competency Framework
Our Six Core Behaviours have been developed with extensive consultation with our employees, to help define what success looks like to all of us, alongside providing insight on behaviours that can inhibit the environment we seek.
We seek consistently high standards of behaviours from every member of our organisation at all levels. These core behaviours are the foundation of all our people processes and our expectation is that they will be weaved into our everyday working life. The behaviours we demonstrate when doing our work is as important as the results we achieve.
We believe it is important to attract people who have the required technical ability and skills, and who also aligns with our core behaviours, to diversify and strengthen teams and the organisation. As part of our recruitment process, we are introducing behavioural based assessments and interviews, where we will seek to identify your individual values and behaviours, ensuring that you will have the potential to flourish in our organisation and the ability to positively influence our culture.
Employee Benefits
We have an attractive benefits package designed to empower your health, wellness, care for family and plan for the future:
Family-friendly environment including options for flexible and part-time working
An on-site workplace nursery salary sacrifice scheme for pre-school children and summer holiday club
Up to 10 days' paid emergency carer's leave per year
Enhanced maternity leave and parental leave
Employee wellbeing programme
Private healthcare scheme
Eyecare and dental payment plans
Access to a substantial number of courses and training events on-site
Auto-enrolment into a generous group defined contribution pension scheme, with enhanced company contribution (for more information, see our Pensions page)
Life assurance – six times your pensionable pay if you are a member of our pension scheme
Group income protection scheme (if on a contract exceeding 12 months)
Tech financial scheme and concessions/discounts from our corporate perks site
Relocation package for all roles
On-site financial services from Barclays Bank
25 days' annual leave (extra 1 day to a maximum of 30 days for every year you work)
Up to 2 days' annual paid volunteering leave
Long service awards (1 – 5 days extra annual leave awarded)
Sabbatical leave
Support groups and networks include: parents and carers network, LGBTQ network, race equity network, solo network, garden network and neurodiversity network
Stars for Science awards (staff recognition programme)
Sports and social club (gym, tennis courts, sports hall, fitness trail and fitness classes)
Being part of the Wellcome Genome Campus, you will enjoy a beautiful working environment with an impressive range of benefits, services and facilities also including:
- Free bus service to and from campus, covering various routes around Cambridge, Saffron Walden and surrounding villages
- A car-share initiative
- Free parking
- A number of on-site venues where you can meet, eat and socialise with colleagues
- A thriving Sports and Social Club which provides members with subsidised access to a gym, tennis courts, sports hall, fitness classes and a vibrant social calendar of events
Tell me about the work you are doing at Sanger and the contributions you have made?
I am working on Saturation Genome Editing (SGE), a method that was developed by Greg Findley a few years ago. Sanger is currently setting up a pipeline for SGE aiming to study 20,000 genes in the next decade, where we will be able to mutate every single nucleotide within a gene of interest and study its functional output for all possible types of mutation. This will provide valuable information to clinics for scanning patients with rare variants in diseases, as many variants currently in ClinVar are unknown.
Is the postdoc what you expected?
I worked for two years as a postdoc at university before I took a break, but the environment for postdocs at Sanger is quite different compared to universities. There’s a lot of support and collaborative opportunities. Everyone works together towards a big project to produce data quicker, which takes a lot of stress away if you’re doing it on your own.