UE06: 30,619.00 to 35,308.00 Per Annum

College of Science and Engineering / School of Physics & Astronomy, James Clerk Maxwell Building, King’s Buildings, Edinburgh

Open Ended Contract – Permanent: Full Time – 35 Hours per Week

The School of Physics & Astronomy is seeking to recruit an enthusiastic, experienced and self-motivated individual to join its technical team; providing dedicated technical support to the research and teaching activities of the UK Centre for Astrobiology within the Institute for Condensed Matter and Complex Systems (ICMCS), fulfilling the role of lead technician within the group.

The Opportunity:

This role offers a fantastic opportunity to apply and develop your technical, scientific, laboratory management, health & safety and project management skills in an exciting, fast-paced and world leading research and teaching environment.

The successful candidate will provide specialist, dedicated technical support across all of the group’s laboratories within the James Clerk Maxwell Building in Edinburgh, and occasionally at a remote underground site in North Yorkshire. You will play a key role in teaching, including Senior Honours student projects; the MSc in Astrobiology and Planetary Sciences, and Integrated Masters programme projects. You will ensure the needs of the group are met through the design, procurement, construction, operation, maintenance and fault diagnosis of equipment and apparatus, and the provision of significant technical input to the development of ongoing and future projects and experiments which will frequently require your assistance in microbiological activities.

In addition to the above, you will also provide some general technical and facilities support across all areas of the School as required. In particular this is likely to include an element of support for the Health & Safety Manager and Technical Services Manager in terms of ad-hoc testing and repair of laboratory equipment and machinery, assistance with space re-allocation and refurbishment, and assisting with laboratory safety audit compliance, particularly with respect to the biophysics laboratories.

As a minimum, you will be educated to HNC/HND level in a physical science or engineering discipline and have previous relevant vocational experience in a scientific laboratory and/or workshop environment. Whilst the role requires reasonable knowledge and experience of instrumentation, experimental apparatus, and laboratory management, training in specialist areas will be provided as required.

The School of Physics & Astronomy aims to ensure equality of opportunity and holds an Athena SWAN Silver award. We welcome applications from everyone irrespective of gender or ethnic group. Appointment will be based on merit alone.

Your skills and attributes for success:
• Well organised with excellent planning skills
• Self-motivated
• Excellent and well proven inter-personal/communication skills
• A high degree of technical expertise
• Relevant experience in a similar role

Click here for a copy of the full job description

As a valued member of our team you can expect:

An exciting, positive, creative, challenging and rewarding place to work. We give you support, nurture your talent and reward success. You will benefit from a competitive reward package and a wide range of staff benefits, which includes a generous holiday entitlement, a defined benefits pension scheme, staff discounts, family friendly initiatives, flexible working and much more. Access our staff benefits page for further information and use our reward calculator to find out the total value of pay and benefits provided.

The University of Edinburgh holds a Silver Athena SWAN award in recognition of our commitment to advance gender equality in higher education. We are members of the Race Equality Charter and we are also Stonewall Scotland Diversity Champions, actively promoting LGBT equality.

Interviews are likely to be held during the second week of May 2023.

If invited for interview you will be required to evidence your right to work in the UK. Further information is available on our right to work webpages.

On this occasion the University will not consider applicants requiring sponsorship for this role. International workers will therefore only be able to take up this role if they can demonstrate an alternative right to work in the UK.

Unless stated otherwise the closing time for applications is 11:59pm GMT. If you are applying outside the UK the closing time on our adverts automatically adjusts to your browsers local time zone.

The School of Physics and Astronomy is in the College of Science and Engineering and comprises the Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics (IPNP), the Institute for Condensed Matter and Complex Systems (ICMCS) and the Institute for Astronomy (IfA). We have around 100 academic staff, over 120 research staff and around 65 professional services staff.

The School of Physics and Astronomy was ranked 4th in the UK and 1st in Scotland in the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021 listing for the quality, scale and breadth of its research by Times Higher Education. Consistently ranked within the top 20 physics departments worldwide, these results confirm the exceptional performance of our staff, our excellent facilities, and our world-leading research.

The School runs undergraduate programmes at BSc and MPhys level in Physics, Mathematical Physics, Theoretical Physics, Computational Physics, Astrophysics and (jointly with the School of Chemistry) Chemical Physics. The undergraduate programme has flexible entry and exit points, creating courses of variable duration and level. The School accepts around 230 new undergraduates into its programmes each year and has current student populations of over 800 undergraduates, 50 taught postgraduates and 220 research postgraduates.

We aim to ensure that our culture and systems support flexible and family-friendly working and recognise and value diversity across all our staff and students. The School has an active programme offering support and professional development for all staff; providing mentoring, training, and networking opportunities.