Research Scientist

Employer: Ellison Institute of Technology

Location: Oxford, Oxfordshire

Salary: Competitive salary

Closing date: Mar 25, 2026

Discipline: Life Sciences

Job Type: Research Scientist

Organization Type: Academia

Job Details

Description

Join us at EIT:

At the Ellison Institute of Technology (EIT), we're on a mission to translate scientific discovery into real world impact. We bring together visionary scientists, technologists, policy makers, and entrepreneurs to tackle humanity's greatest challenges in four transformative areas:

• Health, Medical Science & Generative Biology
• Food Security & Sustainable Agriculture
• Climate Change & Managing CO₂
• Artificial Intelligence & Robotics

This is ambitious work - work that demands curiosity, courage, and a relentless drive to make a difference. At EIT, you'll join a community built on excellence, innovation, tenacity, trust, and collaboration, where bold ideas become real-world breakthroughs. Together, we push boundaries, embrace complexity, and create solutions to scale ideas for lab to society. Explore more at www.eit.org.

Requirements

We are currently hiring for multiple positions across multiple specialised tracks.

We are looking for visionary researchers who can balance high-level theoretical innovation with a mission-driven bias toward execution.

Foundation Models for Embodied AI

This team focuses on developing the next generation of multimodal models that bridge the gap between virtual intelligence and physical action. As a Research Scientist, you will push the boundaries of how agentic AI reasons across modalities, integrating robotics and sensor data to accelerate scientific discovery in the physical world.

• Focus: LLMs, VLMs, and Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, world models.
• Key Challenge: Designing novel architectures for agentic AI that can translate digital reasoning into reliable, real-world physical impact.
• Ideal Background: PhD in ML/AI with a track record of excellence in autoregressive models, deep reinforcement learning, or other generative modeling. Experience at the intersection of AI and robotics is a significant advantage.

AI for Science & Health

This team operates at the frontier of multi-scale modeling, from molecular structures to patient-level data. You will utilise massive datasets including proteins, DNA, EHR, and medical imaging to invent new ML paradigms that solve the most complex puzzles in biology and healthcare.

• Focus: Multimodal generative models, physics-informed ML, and large-scale biological modeling.
• Key Challenge: Creating scalable, high-fidelity models that incorporate long-context biological data and HPC simulations to drive "wet-lab" breakthroughs.
• Ideal Background: PhD in CS, Physics, Mathematics, or Computational Biology. Expertise in large-scale model training, distributed computing, and data management for scientific domains.

Core Responsibilities

Regardless of the track, you will be expected to:

• Innovate & Lead: Conceptualize and develop original ML architectures and foundation models from first principles.
• Publish & Present: Drive the research agenda, contributing to the global AI community through high-impact publications (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, etc.) and technical reports.
• Collaborate: Partner with cross-disciplinary squads of roboticists, clinicians, and biologists to ensure research objectives meet real-world scientific needs.
• Bridge to Production: Work with Research Engineers to translate theoretical breakthroughs into scalable, reproducible, and mission-critical systems.

Qualifications & Skills

Universal Requirements:

• PhD in Machine Learning, AI, Computer Science, or a related quantitative field (Physics, Math, Computational Biology).
• Research Excellence: A proven track record of impactful research demonstrated by publications in top-tier AI venues or scientific journals.
• Technical Mastery: Deep expertise in deep learning frameworks (PyTorch) and the ability to write high-quality, reproducible research code.
• Mission Mindset: A strong desire to apply advanced research to solve tangible, real-world problems in a fast-paced environment.

Track-Specific Expertise:

• For Embodied AI: Demonstrated research in multimodal or agentic AI; specific experience with robotics (ICRA, IROS, CoRL publications) or simulation environments is a strong bonus.
• For Science & Health: Experience with biomolecular datasets, medical imaging, or scientific workflows (Chemistry/Materials Science). Proficiency in HPC integrations and large-scale data management is highly desirable.

Benefits

We offer the following salary and benefits:

• Enhanced holiday pay
• Pension
• Life Assurance
• Income Protection
• Private Medical Insurance
• Hospital Cash Plan
• Therapy Services
• Perk Box
• Electric Car Scheme