Role overview
We are seeking to appoint a Postdoctoral Research Scientist in Statistics to join Professor Xin Lu’s group, with an affiliation with OPIG.
The Lu Group (https://www.ludwig.ox.ac.uk/research/xin-lu-group-page), based at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, and the Oxford Protein Informatics Group (OPIG, http://opig.stats.ox.ac.uk/), based at the Department of Statistics, are recruiting for a Postdoctoral Researcher to perform computational analysis and optimisation of cancer-related B-cell receptors (BCRs)/antibodies.
The Lu Group seek to identify molecular mechanisms that control cellular plasticity and suppress tumour growth. The group works closely with clinicians to investigate cell plasticity in upper gastrointestinal tract cancer initiation, resistance to therapy (oesophageal cancer and gastric cancer), and to discover novel molecules with therapeutic potential.
OPIG works on diverse problems across immunoinformatics, protein structure, and small molecule drug discovery; they use statistics, AI, and computation to generate biological and medical insight. The group focuses on the development of novel algorithms, tools, and databases that are open source and freely available to all users, academic and commercial.
The overall goal of the work is to understand whether the B-cell arm of the adaptive immune system can explain why some individuals are surprisingly resilient to cancer arising or progressing. If this is the case, then the longer-term ambition is to leverage this understanding therapeutically.
Work packages include performing analyses of tumour microenvironment BCRs with recurrently observed autoantigen reactivity profiles, assessing which existing computational strategies maximally inform prioritisation of BCR sequences for cloning and analysis, guiding the optimisation of clones of especial interest, and creating a future-proof database. To achieve this, you will have access to the OPIG compute cluster.
You will also liaise with the broader team of researchers connected to the “Cancer Antibody Atlas” project. This team has recently won a prestigious c. £20m CRUK/NIH grant to characterise BCRs across thousands of tumour microenvironments and cancer-free settings. You will periodically attend and present at joint meetings with researchers funded by this work to inform hypothesis generation and, through collaborative discussion, to design subsequent work packages. You will have the opportunity to develop innovative algorithms and methodologies in the area of immunoinformatics.
It is essential that you hold or be close to completion of a PhD/DPhil in computational chemistry, structural biology/bioinformatics, statistics, machine learning or related field. You will have a strong track record of applying genetics-based, physicochemistry-based and structure-based computational or statistical methodologies to biological data, alongside prior experience o f high-performance computing infrastructure.
Applications for this vacancy should be made online and you will need to upload a supporting statement and CV. Your supporting statement must explain how you meet each of the selection criteria for the post using examples of your skills and experience. Please restrict your documentation to your CV and supporting statement only. Any other documents will be requested at a later date.
This position is offered full time on a fixed term contract until 31 May 2027 and is funded by Ludwig.
Only applications received before 12 midday on Monday, 16 March 2026 will be considered. Please quote 185326 on all correspondence.