Category Archives: Jobs

New DPhil/PhD Programme in Pharmaceutical Science Joint with GSK!

Many OPIGlets found their way into a DPhil in Protein Informatics through our Systems Approaches to Biomedical Sciences Industrial Doctoral Landscape Award, which was open to applicants 2009-2024. This innovative course, based at the MPLS Doctoral Training Centre (DTC), offered six months of intensive taught modules prior to starting PhD-level research, allowing students to upskill across a diverse range of subjects (coding, mathematics, structural biology, etc.) and to go on to do research in areas significantly distinct from their formal Undergraduate training. All projects also benefited from direct co-supervision from researchers working in the Pharmaceutical industry, ensuring DPhil projects in areas with drug discovery translation potential. Regrettably, having twice successfully applied for renewal of funding, we were unsuccessful in our bid to refund SABS in 2024.

Happily though, we can now formally announce that our bid for a direct successor to SABS, the Transformative Technologies in Pharmaceutical Sciences IDLA, has been backed by the BBSRC, and we will shortly be opening for applications for entry this October [2026]. As someone who benefited from the interdisciplinary training and industry-adjacency of SABS, I’m thrilled to be a co-director of this new Programme and to help deliver this course to a new generation of talented students.

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Interested in Research Software Engineering? We’re hiring!

I’ve been working in OPIG as a Research Software Engineer for several years now, and it’s been a fantastic experience. Sadly, my time here is coming to an end, which means we’re looking to hire a new Research Software Engineer to take over! As a computational research group, we write a lot of scientific software and strive to ensure everything we do is open-source and as accessible as possible to both academic and industrial users. Many of these tools are still in use long after the people who wrote them have left the group, and are actively maintained to ensure they remain useful to researchers. Supporting the development and deployment of all of these tools are our Research Software Engineers. This is a great opportunity to work at the intersection of academia and industry, where you will be able to both contribute to world-leading research and maximise the impact of that research by ensuring the tools produced are both accessible and sustainable.

This is a full-time, permanent position in OPIG, based in the Department of Statistics at the University of Oxford. For more details, or to apply, you can find the job details here.

Be a computational chemist and you must be a jack of all trades

Being a jack of all trades brings to mind someone who has extensive multidisciplinary expertise and is equipped with many tools in their toolbox to solve different problems. A jack of all trades is a great succinct description for computational chemists in drug discovery.

Recently I had a great conversation with Dr. Arjun Narayanan, a Senior Research Scientist at Vertex Pharmaceuticals and a jack of all trades as a computational chemist. In this blog post, I’ll describe what he does as a computational chemist, the problems he solves, and the new tools he’s looking forward to adding to his toolbox.

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Former OPIGlets – where are they now?

Since OPIG began in 2003, 53 students* have managed to escape. But where are these glorious people now? I decided to find out, using my best detective skills (aka LinkedIn, Google and Twitter).

* I’m only including full members who have left the group, as per the former members list on the OPIG website

Where are they?

Firstly, the countries. OPIGlets are mostly still residing in the UK, primarily in the ‘golden triangle’ of London, Oxford and Cambridge. The US comes in second, followed closely by Germany (Note: one former OPIGlet is in Malta, which is too small to be recognised in Geopandas so just imagine it is shown on the world map below)

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Commercialising your research: Where to start?

If you look at some of the biggest technology companies in the world, from Google and Facebook to hardware companies like Dell or even biotech unicorns like Oxford’s own Oxford Nanopore, all of them started on university campuses. If you are a researcher interested in finding out how to make the first steps to commercialise your research here is a quick guide:

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