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, engineers, researchers, educators and innovators to tackle humanity’s greatest challenges in four transformative areas:
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 from lab to society. Explore more at www.eit.org.
The Plant Biology Institute, headed by Professor Steve Kelly, is a key part of the Ellison Institute of Technology (EIT) Oxford. The institute aims to develop impactful and commercially sustainable solutions for improving global food production and planetary health through pioneering plant science research.
The Plant Biology Institute will unite world-class researchers who are focused on expanding the frontiers of plant science. Our research is focused on enhancing our ability to feed the planet while simultaneously improving the climate and ecosystem outcomes of food production. By embedding cutting-edge plant science research within an organisation that is focused on solving global challenges at scale, we aim to accelerate the timeline from discovery to global impact.
Areas of exploration include:
Researchers will have access to state-of-the-art laboratory and plant growth facilities and have opportunities to collaborate with experts at the forefront of research on AI, automation, and generative biology across the EIT ecosystem. They will also work with global leaders in market development, commercialisation, and impact creation. The Plant Biology Institute has long-term substantial funding to support the unique scale and ambition of its vision.
The Ellison Institute of Technology (EIT) is seeking a highly motivated and skilled Scientist in Enzymology to join the ‘Yield and Photosynthesis’ programme. This initiative aims to increase sustainable agricultural output from existing farmland by developing crop varieties with higher yield and greater resilience to a changing climate. The successful candidate will play a central role in developing and optimising high-throughput enzyme assays to characterise plant protein variants identified through evolutionary-guided discovery, AI-assisted protein design, and other trait discovery approaches. Working closely with computational scientists and the EIT AI and Robotics Institute, they will establish robust, scalable workflows for protein expression, purification and biochemical characterisation, while helping to develop automated laboratory pipelines that accelerate the identification and optimisation of improved proteins for crop enhancement. The ultimate goal of this research is to deliver transformative improvements in agricultural productivity and resilience, enabling farmers to achieve greater yields from existing agricultural land while reducing the environmental footprint of food production.
The main responsibilities of the successful candidate will be to design, develop, and optimise high-throughput enzyme assays for the quantitative characterisation of protein variants. Successful delivery of this research objective will require expertise in enzyme assay development, protein expression and purification, biochemistry and data analysis. The successful candidate will apply strong experimental design and troubleshooting skills to develop robust, scalable and reproducible assay platforms using simple, reliable plate-based readouts suitable for high-throughput screening and automation.
Insights generated from this work will directly inform iterative cycles of protein engineering and go/no go decisions for in vivo validation, with the goal of generating higher yielding crops that are resilient to our changing climate. The successful candidate will work closely with computational scientists to translate in silico protein design, AI-guided predictions and trait discovery outputs into experimentally testable hypotheses.
This role offers a unique opportunity to develop cutting-edge biochemical characterisation technologies at the interface of enzymology, protein engineering and plant science. The successful candidate will serve as a key scientific contact for EIT's AI and Robotics Institute, working closely with automation engineers, roboticists and AI researchers to design, implement and optimise automated workflows for protein expression, purification and enzyme assays. Working within a highly multidisciplinary team, they will help establish experimental platforms that integrate automation, computational design and biochemical validation to accelerate protein optimisation.
The scientist will be expected to contribute to publications and IP generation and play an active role in translating research into real-world and commercial solutions aligned with EITʼs mission of humane technological advancement. This is an exciting opportunity to perform cutting-edge research in a dynamic, well-supported, and purpose-driven environment.
Led by a world-class faculty of scientists, technologists, policy makers, economists and entrepreneurs, the Ellison Institute of Technology aims to deliver scaled solutions to humanity's important problems.
By breaking down the silos between science, research, industry and policy, we are reimagining the path from scientific discovery to applied solutions for the benefit of society.
Set for completion in 2027, the EIT Campus in Littlemore will include more than 300,000 sq ft of research laboratories, educational and gathering spaces.
Fuelled by growing ambition and the strength of Oxford’s science ecosystem, EIT is now expanding its footprint to a 2 million sq ft Campus across the western part of The Oxford Science Park.
Designed by Foster + Partners led by Lord Norman Foster, this will become a transformative workplace for up to 7,000 people, with autonomous laboratories, purpose-built laboratories including a plant sciences building and dynamic spaces to spark interdisciplinary collaboration.
