Controlled Environment Lead - Plant Biology Institute

Join us at EIT:

At the Ellison Institute of Technology (EIT), we’re on a mission to translate scientific discovery into real world impact. We bring together visionary scientists, technologists, engineers, researchers, educators and innovators to tackle humanity’s greatest challenges in four transformative areas:

• Health, Medical Science & Generative Biology
• Food Security & Sustainable Agriculture
• Climate Change & Managing CO₂
• Artificial Intelligence & Robotics

This is ambitious work - work that demands curiosity, courage, and a relentless drive to make a difference. At EIT, you’ll join a community built on excellence, innovation, tenacity, trust, and collaboration, where bold ideas become real-world breakthroughs. Together, we push boundaries, embrace complexity, and create solutions to scale ideas from lab to society. Explore more at www.eit.org.

About The Plant Biology Institute

The Plant Biology Institute, headed by Professor Steve Kelly, is a key part of the Ellison Institute of Technology (EIT) Oxford. The institute aims to develop impactful and commercially sustainable solutions for improving global food production and planetary health through pioneering plant science research.

The Plant Biology Institute will unite world-class researchers who are focused on expanding the frontiers of plant science. Our research is focussed on enhancing our ability to feed the planet while simultaneously improving the climate and ecosystem outcomes of food production. By embedding cutting-edge plant science research within an organisation that is focused on solving global challenges at scale, we aim to accelerate the timeline from discovery to global impact.

Areas of exploration include:

• Improved plant productivity, both indoors and outside.
• Reduced reliance on inputs including water, fertilisers, pesticides, and herbicides.
• Novel decarbonised plant-based production platforms for food and medicines.
• Advanced technologies that speed up discovery and deployment in plants. 

Researchers will have access to state-of-the-art laboratory and plant growth facilities and have opportunities to collaborate with experts at the forefront of research on AI, automation, and generative biology across the EIT ecosystem. They will also work with global leaders in market development, commercialisation, and impact creation. The Plant Biology Institute has long-term substantial funding to support the unique scale and ambition of its vision.

Your Role:

At EIT we are seeking a Controlled Environment Lead to build and oversee our plant growth and phenotyping facilities. This is an impactful, foundational role that will be responsible for establishing expertise, processes, facilities and the team itself and has significant growth potential. This role will initially report to the Director, Technology Development. This role will also participate in (and may develop to own and oversee) our growing field trial resources and operations.

The successful candidate will have deep expertise and significant hands-on experience growing field crops and other species across diverse growth regimes in the support of scientific crop improvement. The ideal candidate will have comprehensive knowledge of plant cultivation equipment, facilities, techniques and processes. This is a player-coach role. Initially, the successful candidate will personally perform greenhouse, chamber, and (potentially) field work - including planting, transplanting, irrigation, scouting, pollination, sampling, data capture, harvest, and trial logistics - while also establishing the systems and team to lead these functions as the company grows.

This role will be expected to contribute to publications and IP generation and play an active role in translating research into real-world and commercial solutions aligned with EIT’s mission of humane technological advancement. This role offers a unique opportunity to conduct high-impact research at the forefront of plant science while collaborating across multidisciplinary teams to drive innovation from lab to global impact.

Your Responsibilities:

• Ensure the delivery of steadily controlled, reproducible, clean and precisely tracked growth environments in controlled environment growth chambers and greenhouses, including proactive development of controlled environment facility contingency plans.
• Grow impeccably healthy plants, scouting and proactively solving abiotic, pest and pathogens issues in order to produce mission-critical experimental data, tissue samples and seeds.
• Oversee (and personally contribute to) activities including planting, transplanting, watering, fertilising, trimming, measuring, pollinating, tissue sampling, seed collection, and pesticide application across crop species.
• Contribute to design of and oversee/contribute to the collection of technical phenotype data, ensuring rigorous capture and organisation of protocols and data.
• Own pathogen and pest scouting and pesticide application, paying careful attention to safety and regulatory requirements and best practices and holding or working to acquire required pesticide application certifications. Develop and document sitewide phytosanitary procedures and outbreak management plans.
• Create and maintain a tightly organised, well-scheduled and perfectly recorded inventory of materials that move through our plant growth facilities to support predictable scientific progress, maximise the best use of our resources and ensure stewardship of proprietary and genetically modified materials.
• Proactively ensure regulatory and permitting compliance in the growth, documentation and eventual disposal of genetically modified (GMO) and gene-edited plant events, in collaboration with internal colleagues.
• Provide excellent service and technical support to our scientific teams, including clear communication and proactive assistance and oversight of experimental design that is based on a deep technical understanding of plant physiology as well as the goals of the research question. Act as a scientific resource and partner in relevant aspects of plant physiology, pathology, horticulture and (ideally) molecular plant physiology.
• Contribute to (ideally, lead) the design of our strategy for future technical and personnel hiring and growth within our Event Validation team; ideally, lead hiring of and supervision of future staff within this team.

Requirements

Essential Knowledge, Skills and Experience:

• PhD in horticulture, plant science, plant pathology, agronomy or other relevant role plus at least 5 years hands-on experience growing plants within a research or production greenhouse or controlled environment facility.
• Deep practical expertise in research greenhouse and controlled-environment operations: propagation through harvest; irrigation/fertigation; nutrient management; lighting, temperature, humidity, and CO₂/environmental controls; and growth-chamber operation.
• Strong plant-health capability: scouting, diagnosis, IPM, sanitation, pesticide application/recordkeeping and facility hygiene/biosecurity.
• Experience growing and evaluating crops in a research or production environment, ideally including transgenic/gene-edited plants, breeding materials, or other identity-preserved material.
• Direct experience planning, running, and troubleshooting replicated greenhouse, chamber, and field experiments - not only supporting experiments designed by others; Strong understanding of trial design, experimental controls, randomisation/replication, and translating biological questions into practical trial protocols.
• Data fluency: rigorous phenotypic data collection, QC, metadata/environmental tracking, traceability, and basic statistical analysis/visualisation.
• Experience maintaining SOPs, electronic notebooks/LIMS or relational databases, seed/plant-material inventories, and clear version-controlled documentation.
• Builder mentality: improves workflows, anticipates failure modes, and creates processes from scratch rather than waiting for established infrastructure. Builds and optimizes while executing.
• Demonstrated ability to lead, train, and develop greenhouse, controlled-environment, and field staff while personally working alongside the team when priorities demand it.
• Ability to build scalable operating systems: crop calendars, work planning, staffing plans, SOPs, facility schedules, inventories, and KPIs for plant health, throughput, quality, and experiment on-time completion.

Desirable Knowledge, Skills and Experience:

• Demonstrated people management and leadership experience is preferred.
• Expertise, experience and interest in cutting-edge and experimental, high-content and high-throughput phenotyping technologies and/or automated and AI workflows is appreciated.
• Knowledge of statistical and data management software is appreciated.
• Experience growing, pollinating and harvesting seed from maize, wheat and/or soybean.
• Field trial experience is appreciated.

Benefits

We offer the following benefits:

• Competitive salary (dependent on experience) + travel allowance + bonus
• Enhanced holiday. Our annual leave allowance is 25 days plus 8 bank holidays and an additional 3 days between Christmas and New Year. You will also have the opportunity to purchase an additional 5 days annual leave in January and July.
• Pension - Employer contribution 7.5%, minimum employee contribution 5%
• Life Assurance.
• Income Protection
• Private Medical Insurance as standard for you, your partner and any dependents. Including hospital Cash Plan
• Employee discounts
• Electric car scheme
• Nursery Salary Sacrifice scheme
• Cycle to Work Scheme
• Family Planning
• Neurodiversity support including advise and assessments
• Coaching & Therapy services

Working Together – What It Involves:

• You must have the right to work permanently in the UK with a willingness to travel as necessary. In certain cases, we can consider sponsorship, and this will be assessed on a case-by-case basis.
• You must be based in, or within easy commuting distance of Oxford
• During peak periods, some longer hours may be required and some working across multiple time zones due to the global nature of the programme.