Welcome to the Generative Biology Institute:
Led by Founding Director Jason Chin, the Generative Biology Institute (GBI) at the Ellison Institute of Technology is tackling the key challenges in making biology engineerable, and thereby releasing the unrivalled power of biology for the benefit of humanity.
The vision of GBI is to lay the foundations for engineering biology, and unlock its potential for good. To achieve this, we must overcome two key challenges. First, we need the ability to write in the natural language of biology, enabling the rapid and scalable synthesis of entire genomes with precision. Second, we must understand what to write - determining which DNA sequences will generate biological systems that perform the desired functions. Addressing these challenges will allow us to harness the full power of biology to create transformative solutions across health, agriculture, clean energy and more.
The Generative Biology Institute commenced operations in 2025, occupying newly renovated bespoke space in the Oxford Science Park. The team will later move to a purpose-made facility in the Oxford Science Park, currently under construction. Once complete, this state-of-the-art facility will include more than 40,000 m² of research laboratory and office space. It will house over 30 groups and up to 600 employees at scale, focused on solving the two critical challenges in making biology engineerable and applying the solutions to addressing the global challenges encapsulated in EIT’s Humane Endeavours.
The AI & Robotics team at EIT brings together AI research, robotics and scientific expertise to make biological matter computable and testable, at scale, and by any scientist. We build generative and predictive models of biological molecules and systems, physics-grounded simulation and design tools, and autonomous laboratories that generate the data these models learn from and test the designs they propose.
You will be joining the project Monera, a joint project across the Generative Biology Institute and the AI & Robotics team building multi-modal generative models of whole organisms, starting with Escherichia coli in order to understand and predict an organism’s phenotype from its genome and environment and, in time, to design genomes for a desired function. The team works as one integrated computational and experimental group: experimentalists generate genetic variation and quantitative measurements at scale (growth and fitness, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics), the models are trained and validated on that data, and the results shape the next round of experiments and insights. The experimental work is based in GBI’s laboratories in the Oxford Science Park, alongside GBI’s automation capability and in daily contact with the AI scientists in the AI & Robotics team.
We are building a joint experimental computational team focussed on building, training and validating multi-modal biological models.
The team will: i) generate experimental perturbation and measurement data at scale, ii) build multi-modal biological models and, iii) use the experimental data they generate to train and validate the multi-modal biological models they build.
In this role you will: i) perform experimental genome engineering work to generate genetic variation at scale and/or ii) design and implement scalable biological measurement over one or more modalities. Where appropriate the work will leverage the substantial automation capability within the institute. Your work will be performed under the guidance of Jason Chin.
You will be part of a single team composed of AI scientists and synthetic biologists working together. We are looking for colleagues with deep expertise in genome engineering and/or quantitative phenotyping of model bacterial species such as Escherichia coli. The role requires the ability and willingness to work as part of a cross-disciplinary team at the interface of computational and wetlab biology. Our team ethos is based on mutual learning, strong peer-to-peer support, and a deep sense of scientific curiosity and ambition.
This is your opportunity to be part of cutting-edge research within an institute dedicated to engineering biology at an unprecedented scale. You will be leveraging GBI’s exceptional facilities, sustained funding, and collaborative environment. You will design and execute experiments, contribute to high-impact publications, and play a key role in the training and mentorship of junior researchers and students. Working at the interface of biology, AI, technology, and engineering, you will help shape GBI’s vision to reimagine what’s possible in biology.