Job Specifications
About Us
The Parsons Group, King's College London , has an exciting opportunity for a Postdoctoral Research Associate to join their dynamic, interdisciplinary team to shape how multimodal bioimaging data is stored, shared and reused.
The Parsons Group is based in Randall Centre for Cell & Molecular Biophysics , home to a diverse array of structural and cellular biology research, which is part of the School of Basic & Biomedical Sciences . This sits in the Faculty of Life Sciences & Medicine , which has a broad spectrum of research interests spanning fundamental biology, disease, and physiology. The Group are based at the Guy's Campus of King's College London situated in the heart of London.
King's is a founding member of the prestigious Russell Group of world-class, research-intensive universities.
About The Role
The postholder will work as part of a broader international team - including Dundee, EMBL-EBI and German Bioimaging - to develop next gen file format strategies and data management for existing large complex multimodal human tissue bioimaging datasets at KCL.
The broader goal of the overall programme, funded through the Wellcome Trust bioimaging technology development initiative, is to deliver multimodal datasets in an interoperable manner through open access repositories for onward ML/AI applications and hence drive future biological insight. The work will be primarily undertaken at King's College London within the Randall Centre, a world-renowned hub for biophysics and bioimaging excellence, with additional opportunities to work closely with our partners. World-class facilities and training are provided, within a dynamic, vibrant and inclusive research environment, with opportunities to engage with broader collaborators and drive forward pioneering solutions to understand complex multimodal spatial data.
This is a full-time post, 35 hours per week, and you will be offered a fixed term contract to 30th April 2029, starting no earlier than 1st May 2026.
This role is a hybrid role which is 50% onsite and 50% working remotely
Research staff at King's are entitled to at least 10 days per year (pro-rata) for professional development. This entitlement, from the Concordat to Support the Career Development of Researchers , applies to Postdocs, Research Assistants, Research and Teaching Technicians, Teaching Fellows and AEP equivalent up to and including grade 7. Visit the Centre for Research Staff Development for more information.
About You
To be successful in this role, we are looking for candidates to have the following skills and experience:
Essential Criteria
PhD in relevant subject area *
Experience in working with bioimaging and other spatial data, including managing and converting between file formats
Experience with spatial data analysis tools/platforms (e.g.: napari)
Programming skills working with image data in Python
Experience with metadata, data integration and standards for bioimaging data
Experience working in multidisciplinary teams and at the interface between biological data, biologists and data scientists/software engineers
Strong communication and presentation skills
Ability to write scientific documents and papers
Please note that this is a PhD level role but candidates who have submitted their thesis and are awaiting award of their PhDs will be considered. In these circumstances the appointment will be made at Grade 5, spine point 30 with the title of Research Assistant. Upon confirmation of the award of the PhD, the job title will become Research Associate and the salary will increase to Grade 6.
Desirable criteria
Prior experience working with human tissue and clinical data
Experience of working with bioimaging data sharing repositories
Specific experience working with OME-Zarr and/or OME-TIFF
Experience building computational tools for data management and/or analysis
Downloading a Copy Of Our Job Description
Full details of the role and the skills, knowledge and experience required can be found in the Job Description document, provided at the bottom of the page. This document will provide information of what criteria will be assessed at each stage of the recruitment process.
Further Information
At King's, we believe that the diversity of our community and a culture that is welcoming, open, inclusive and collaborative, are great strengths of the university.
The Equality Act of 2010 protects the rights of our students and staff and provides a framework to fulfil our duties to eliminate unlawful discrimination, harassment and victimisation and in addition, to advance equality of opportunity and foster good relations between those who share a protected characteristic and those who do not. At times, this will include balancing rights and beliefs that can feel in tension.
We are committed to free speech and to academic freedom, believing that our foundational purpose as a university, is to create spaces where a wide range of ideas, including ideas that are controver