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 aControlled 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.