"Laboratories and Safety Manager"

The Department of Geography at UCL are seeking a full time, permanent Laboratories and Safety Manager, who will play a key role in realising the teaching and research strategy of the Department, including facilitating academic research and innovation, achieving sustainability targets, and developing a positive technical staffing culture. The appointee will manage and oversee the Laboratory operations, line manage four technical staff and provide expert technical support (including hands-on) in the effective and safe delivery of research and teaching facilities as well as field work provision for academic and research staff, students and visitors.

The postholder is responsible for the health and safety of the laboratory facilities and geoscience equipment, ensuring the department is compliant with safety legislation and University policy. This includes co-ordinating the duties and training of Deputy Safety Officers and departmental Fire Marshalls; ensuring staff, students and visitors have completed health and safety inductions; chairing departmental safety committees; and advising on safety for fieldwork, including offering advice and approval of fieldwork risk assessments. Budget oversight and responsibility for the lab facilities is also a key part of the role.

The Department of Geography is widely recognised as one of the leading geography departments in the world (4th worldwide in the QS Ranking 2025, 2nd in the Shanghai world rankings 2024). Investment in laboratory facilities has established the Department as a world-leading centre for laboratory-based environmental science. Laboratory facilities include:

• a dedicated water chemistry laboratory for anion, nutrient and stable isotope analyses, wet rooms for sieving and sorting sediment and biological samples, in addition to drying and freeze-drying facilities.
• facilities for the curation of sediment cores and samples and for the routine preparation of sediments for sedimentological, palaeoecological (diatoms, macrofossil, pollen, foraminifera, ostracods), geochemical and stable isotope analyses. The laboratories include: an ultra-clean preparation room with laminar flow bench for trace element analysis and biomarkers; two HF-grade laboratories for pollen sample preparations; a suite of research microscopes and reference collections for microfossil analyses; Investment has enhanced our capabilities for bulk geochemical and grain size analyses of sediments and trace metal analyses of calcite microfossils.
• standard and specialist gear for collecting water, sediment and biological samples from lakes and ponds, estuaries and coasts, and rivers. It also an extensive range of field equipment, including five research boats, Livingstone, Russian, Hiller, Mini Mackereth gravity and percussion corers, hydrographic and coastal oceanographic instrumentation, dGPS, sounding and side-scan sonar equipment.
• UCL’s Environmental Radiometric Facility (ERF), that comprises five Ametek gamma spectrometers for radioisotope analyses, including 210Pb/137Cs dating.

The department also has access to the Bloomsbury Environmental Isotope Facility (BEIF); a central UCL mass spectrometer facility equipped to measure stable isotopes and MP-ICS equipment in Earth Sciences.

Applicants must have degree-level knowledge of applied science as well as recent experience of a range of practical laboratory techniques and knowledge of some analytical methods; appropriate knowledge of laboratory fixed systems (eg fume cupboards, chemical storage, gas alarm systems) and experience of safety management and safety audit. Expertise in Physical Geography, Environmental science or Geoscience, experience of radiation safety management, budget management within the university environment are desirable, but not required.

Please see the full job description and person specification for more information.