The United Kingdom Health Security Agency (UKHSA) is a system leader for health security; taking action internationally to strengthen global health security, providing trusted advice to government and the public and reducing inequalities in the way different communities experience and are impacted by infectious disease, environmental hazards, and other threats to health.
UKHSA’s remit, as an agency with a global-to-local reach, is to protect the health of the nation from infectious diseases and other external threats to health. As the nation’s expert national health security agency UKHSA will:
- Prevent: anticipate threats to health and help build the nation’s readiness, defences and health security
- Detect: use cutting edge environmental and biological surveillance to proactively detect and monitor infectious diseases and threats to health
- Analyse: use world-class science and data analytics to assess and continually monitor threats to health, identifying how best to control and mitigate the risks
- Respond: take rapid, collaborative and effective actions nationally and locally to mitigate threats to health when they materialise
- Lead: lead strong and sustainable global, national, regional and local partnerships designed to save lives, protect the nation from public health threats and reduce inequalities.
Job overview
The Countermeasures Development and Evaluation Centre is based at Porton and has approximately 250 staff, performing a range of research activities, including high containment level work. The department’s work covers a broad range of projects involving vaccine and therapeutic, discovery, evaluation, development, and research.
The Antimicrobial Development, Discovery and Diagnostics (AD3) team sits in the Countermeasures Development, Evaluation and Preparedness Division in the Public Health Microbiology Directorate within the Chief Scientific Officer Group. Its work focuses on the discovery, development and evaluation of antimicrobial therapies directed at UKHSA priority pathogens, with a particular focus on AMR/emerging pathogens. The post holder will be involved in screening novel therapies, including non-traditional therapies such as bacteriophage and antimicrobial peptides, for antimicrobial activity against ACDP2 bacteria and fungi.
- Experience of working with ACDP2 pathogens such as performing MICs, biofilm models and high throughput screening is essential, while experience in the use of robotics in the lab and programming languages such as R, are desirable.
- Experience of supervising students is desirable, and it is expected that the post holder will work independently, taking a leading role in research in the lab.