Postdoctoral Research Associate

Grade UE07: £41,064 to £48,822 per annum

College of Science and Engineering/ School of Physics and Astronomy

Full Time: 35 hours per week 

Fixed Term: 3 years October 1, 2027 – September 30, 2030 

The Opportunity: 

Together we can do great things. Be part of something bigger. 

The University isn’t just any employer. We are part of a local community and a contributor to global thinking, progress and research. In Edinburgh, you are in one of the world’s most attractive cities with active arts and social sectors, while working in a University that has made significant contributions to society, medicine, physics and teaching for over four centuries. Our people have helped create the modern world and are working on more ground-breaking technologies and practices. 

The University of Edinburgh is a world-class organisation. We look for the best in the field across all disciplines and provide a working environment where academics can develop their careers and passion for their chosen subject area. We offer the full range of academic roles and have a genuine focus on our students performance and wellbeing.

This position will contribute to the STFC Consolidated Grant UKRI4228 ‘Particle Theory at the Higgs Centre’. Research activities will be oriented towards scattering amplitudes in gravitational physics, motivated by gravitational waves, cosmology, and formal theory, working with Tim Adamo, Anton Ilderton, Donal O’Connell, Mao Zeng and the wider group. This post is full-time (35 hours per week). 

This post is full time 35 hours per week. We are open to considering requests for hybrid working  (on a non-contractual basis) that combines a mix of remote and regular on-campus working.

Please view the full Job Description 

How to apply 

Applications should be submitted before the deadline of 11:59pm UK time on 27 November 2026. Please upload a CV and a brief research statement (strictly less than 3 pages including references) and provide the names and contact details of at least two referees. The referees will be approached for letters after the long-listing process.  

Address any enquiries regarding the position to Tim Adamo ([email protected]), Anton Ilderton ([email protected]), Donal O’Connell ([email protected]) or Mao Zeng ([email protected]). 

As a valued member of our team, you can expect:  

• A competitive salary.  
• An exciting, positive, creative, challenging and rewarding place to work.  
• To be part of a diverse and vibrant international community. 
• Comprehensive Staff Benefits, including generous annual leave entitlement, a defined benefits pension scheme, a wide range of staff discounts, family-friendly initiatives, and flexible work options. Check out the full list on our staff benefits page (opens in a new tab) and use our reward calculator to discover the value of your pay and benefits.  

Championing equality, diversity, and inclusion 

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 a Stonewall Proud Employer, actively promoting LGBTQ+ equality.  

We welcome applications from all qualified candidates and particularly encourage applications from people of colour, women, people with disabilities, LGBTQ+ people and other minority and under-represented groups. 

Prior to any employment commencing with the University, you will be required to evidence your right to work in the UK. Further information is available on our right to work webpages(opens new browser tab). 

The University may be able to sponsor the employment of international workers in this role. This will depend on a number of factors specific to the successful applicant. 

Key dates to note 

The closing date for applications is 27 November 2026. 

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

Interview dates to be confirmed.

The Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics is composed of three research groups. 

The Particle Physics Experiments group seeks understanding of the fundamental particles of nature and the interactions governing their behaviour. In particular, we aim to explain the dominance of matter over anti-matter through the study of CP violation with the LHCb experiment: to understand the mechanisms of electroweak symmetry breaking that lead to the creation of mass, and to search for new particles at ATLAS and future colliders; to discover and characterise particle dark matter with the LUX-ZEPLIN and DarkSide-20k experiments; and to explore neutrino oscillations, and neutrinos of astrophysical origin with experiments distributed grid computing (GridPP), to store and analyse the vast quantities of data that are produced in these endeavours.

The Particle Physics Theory Group is interested in fundamental physics at all energy scales, from the hadronic binding energy scale, to the scale of present and future particle colliders, up to the energy scales of the very early universe at its first fractional second of existence. We have interest and theoretical involvement in most current and upcoming particle physics experiments, high energy colliders, and in observations made by the WMAP and Planck satellites. We pursue the very latest developments in both perturbative and nonperturbative field theory, renormalization theory, and the application of quantum field theory to other branches of physics such as turbulence theory and condensed matter systems.

The Nuclear Physics Group has a broad and diverse range of research interests aimed at understanding the properties and structure of nuclei, the origin of the chemical elements in the universe, and the way in which nuclear reactions power some of the most spectacular stellar explosions, such as novae, supernovaea and X-ray bursts. Our research is performed at world-leading oversea laboratories (TRIUMF, RIKEN, GSI, LNGS, CERN and others), using a variety of experimental techniques and state-of-the-art instrumentation developed by the group.