UCL Research Career Development: Expression of Interest

About us

The Research Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment, (GEE) at University College London (UCL) is organised into six Centres, with cross-cutting research interests, and close links with other organisations, including the Francis Crick Institute, the Natural History Museum, and The Zoological Society of London. The department has a long and rich history across many biological topics, a summary of which can be found here.

GEE is grouped into six centres that are especially interested in the following research areas:

Institute of Healthy Aging: Ageing, age-related disease; interventions improving late-life health in model systems (e.g. cellular senescence); applying computational approaches to ageing and late-life disease (AI, big data, medical genomics).

Centre for Biodiversity and Environment Research: Evolution in response to environmental change; theoretical ecology/evolution; community or behavioural ecology (especially in plants, insects, fungi or microbes); biodiversity and its contributions to human health and well-being.

Centre for Life’s Origins and Evolution: Origins and diversification of major groups of life; comparative genomics; evolution of cells and cell types; invertebrate palaeontology, plant and fungal evolutionary genomics, experimental evolution.

UCL Centre for Computational Biology: Big data and computation; computational genomics; computational phylogenomics.

UCL Genetics Institute: Computational approaches to biology or medicine; computational tool development and applying them to genomic data; high-throughput bioinformatics, statistical genetics; metagenomics.

UCL East People and Nature Lab: Cross-disciplinary solutions hub bringing together expertise from ecology, computer science, public health, built environment and social science to gather evidence on how we can best manage our natural resources for a sustainable and resilient future.

About the role

GEE invites Expressions of Interest from Early Career Researchers (ECRs) who wish to be sponsored to apply for external fellowships to establish an independent research group. GEE offers a world-class, interactive and supportive research environment within the Division of Biosciences at UCL. We are strongly committed to recruiting and supporting the most promising ECRs who choose to secure a Group Leader Fellowship as their route to becoming a Principal Investigator. This policy applies to senior fellowships such as Wellcome Trust Henry Dale, MRC CDA, BBSRC David Phillips, NERC IRF, Royal Society URF, CRUK, ERC Starting Grants and equivalent fellowships.

The deadline for this round is 25 April 2025.

Salary is provided by the external award that is secured in future applications to the relevant fellowship schemes.

About you

We are looking for candidates of the highest calibre, able to demonstrate an exceptional track record in relation to their career stage, and have the potential to submit competitive fellowship applications and secure external funding. Your initial application will be pre-assessed by several members of staff. We will also identify the researcher in GEE closest to your field, who will act as your sponsor and guide you through the selection process.

If selected as a suitable candidate following pre-assessment, you will be invited to deliver a research talk to present your recent work and fellowship plans. This is planned to occur in early June 2025. You will get the chance to meet our staff and students and view our facilities. In addition, you will get the opportunity to meet current GEE fellows, including those who have progressed to permanent positions within the department, and learn about the supportive and stimulating environment we offer. Where a visit is not possible, the discussion will be conducted online. Following a positive outcome of the visit, we will identify a sponsor(s) to support your fellowship application.

Eligibility:

Candidates should confirm their eligibility for specific fellowship schemes and will be required to provide evidence of eligibility to work in the UK before commencing any fellowship offered.

To apply, please ensure to attach the following:

1. Your CV (3 pages maximum).
2. A brief (2 pages maximum) document outlining your research proposal that will form your first fellowship application.
3. A list of fellowship schemes you are planning to apply for (the main ones are listed on our website), checking your eligibility for the schemes.
4. A document (1 page maximum) describing how you see yourself and your research fitting into the department.

What we offer

We provide support to ensure that fellows can successfully establish their own research group, have opportunities to gain teaching skills and play a full role in the running of the department. Our commitment starts with academic and administrative support at the application and interview stages and continues throughout the tenure of the fellowship, with regular career development and mentoring programmes. We expect fellows to develop into strong candidates for Principal Investigator positions in the department or elsewhere. In line with this ethos, a large proportion of our past departmental fellows have progressed to permanent positions in GEE.

For further details visit our fellowship homepage: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/biosciences/gee/fellowships

For informal enquiries and more information, please contact the GEE Fellowship Coordinators:

Professor David Murrell, d.murrell@ucl.ac.uk 

Professor Hernán Burbano, h.burbano@ucl.ac.uk 

Our commitment to Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

As London’s Global University, we know diversity fosters creativity and innovation, and we want our community to represent the diversity of the world’s talent. We are committed to equality of opportunity, to being fair and inclusive, and to being a place where we all belong.

We therefore particularly encourage applications from candidates who are likely to be underrepresented in UCL’s workforce. These include people from Black, Asian and ethnic minority backgrounds; disabled people; LGBTQI+ people; and for our Grade 9 and 10 roles, women.

Our division holds an Athena SWAN Silver award, in recognition of our commitment to advancing gender equality.