Programme Manager (Fixed Term)

University of Cambridge - Department of Psychiatry

Location: Cambridge

Salary: £42,254 to £56,535 per annum

Hours: Full Time

Contract Type: Fixed-Term/Contract

Placed On: 27th March 2026

Closes: 12th April 2026

Job Ref: RN49199

Limit of tenure: 1st February 2029

Full-Time, Monday to Friday

This is opportunity to lead and shape a research programme. The Open Psychiatry Project (OPP) is a £2.4 million, UKRI- and NIHR-funded collaboration spanning six UK institutions, NHS Trusts, the European Bioinformatics Institute, and industry partners. Its ambition is bold: to transform how mental health ‘omic’ data - genetic, proteomic and metabolomic - is accessed, analysed and used to drive new treatments for patients. Mental health conditions affect millions of people and cost the UK economy around £300 billion per year, yet research funding and therapeutic innovation have lagged far behind other disease areas. OPP is a direct response to that challenge. The Programme Manager will drive this project, working closely with and reporting to the Principal Investigator, Dr Mary-Ellen Lynall.

OPP will enhance the EBI Open Targets Platform (73,000 users worldwide) with psychiatric omics data to maximise the utility of the platform for target discovery, biomarker discovery, and accessibility to non-scientists. OPP will build an open platform connecting multiple UK mental health omic datasets through privacy-preserving federated analysis in collaboration with commercial partner Bitfount and the DATAMIND Trusted Research Environment. For the first time, researchers, clinicians, industry, and patients will be able to access and interrogate psychiatric omic datasets at scale without compromising individual privacy. The project encompasses five major workstreams: enhancing containerised workflows for federated genomic analysis; enhancing the Open Targets Platform to maximise its ability to prioritise treatment targets for mental health disorders; establishing FedOMICS, a new mental health omic data federation framework with the necessary governance structures and data access agreements; embedding co-production with people with lived experience throughout; and scoping commercialisation pathways. The programme involves leading academic centres, NHS Trusts and Secure Data Environments across the UK, as well as international consortia including the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium.

This role will take ownership of delivering this multi-partner project on time and within budget. This involves coordinating activity across institutions at Cambridge, Edinburgh, Swansea, and the European Bioinformatics Institute; managing a £2.4 million budget; overseeing governance, reporting and finance; line-managing junior colleagues; serving as the central point of contact for the Executive Committee, co-investigators, institutional leads, and funders. The post-holder will have an important role in developing follow-on funding applications and commercialisation strategy.

OPP has the potential to position the UK as the leading international provider of open, accessible mental health omic data, and to accelerate the development of genuinely personalised treatments for patients. We are looking for an experienced, motivated programme manager who is ready to take on a complex role that sits at the intersection of cutting-edge data science, clinical research, and meaningful patient involvement.

Dr Mary-Ellen Lynall, Department of Psychiatry
Email: mel41@cam.ac.uk

If you have any queries regarding the application process please contact Simon Gurry, HR Coordinator via email hradminpsychiatry@medschl.cam.ac.uk

Deadline for applications is 19th April 2026, interviews TBC.