Head of LIBRTI Digital Science

Job Description

About us  

Fusion, the process that powers the sun and stars, is one of the most promising options for generating the cleaner, carbon-free energy that our world badly needs. UKAEA leads the way in realizing fusion energy, partnering with industry and research organisations to achieve ground-breaking advancements. Our goal is to bring fusion electricity to the grid by developing the power stations of tomorrow and the skilled workforce to deliver them.  

About the job 

Lead the digital science strategy for LIBRTI, a £220 million UKAEA flagship programme developing a world-first facility to demonstrate the feasibility of breeding tritium for fusion power. You'll bring together physics, materials science, computing and advanced modelling to develop the digital capabilities needed to design, validate and commercialise future fusion technologies. This is an opportunity to shape a pioneering area of applied science, lead a high-impact research team and help establish the UK's position at the forefront of fusion innovation.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Build relationships with incumbent and emerging digital specialists (from corporates such as GTD, Siemens, McLaren to SMEs such as DigiLab) as well as UK Centres of Excellence (Turing, Hartree etc) to understand the art of the possible in full data integration strategies for £100M+ programmes in science and engineering.
• Design, deliver and communicate, LIBRTI’s Digital Strategy, harnessing inputs from the Computing Division, Innovation Team and Commercial-Legal Team. This strategy must ensure FAIR (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, Reusability) compliance for a platform that must face the LIBRTI Facility’s future users, suppliers and operators.
• Design the data capture and management system to integrate with the Facility control and instrumentation hardware/software such that LIBRTI is positioned on a technical trajectory towards a digital twin, ensuring that LIBRTI remains cutting edge in the longer term.
• Design and deliver an R&D programme (~£2M/year through the Programme lifetime) via internal projects, PhD’s and contracted collaborations, to provide the code, code integration, uncertainty quantification required to support the Multiphysics (Digital Physics) platform for LIBRTI.  The Multiphysics platform will integrate materials, engineering and nuclear data, with customer breeder blanket designs, to predict and then validate, tritium breeding at powerplant-relevant scales. This data output is ultimately, the commercial IP from LIBRTI which justifies this £200M+ taxpayer investment. This is a world-first area of scientific impact and requires moving in sync with USA national laboratories such as INL to ensure UK maintains first mover advantage overall.
• Align LIBRTI digital platform and digital science strategy and tools with wider UKAEA intentions around the £100M+ STRIDE Programme and the UK Government’s AI aspirations within the Industrial Strategy.
• Engage with senior stakeholders (UKAEA ExCo) to ensure LIBRTI digital strategy takes account of the broader organisation’s philosophies and aspirations around research data management and commercialisation.
• Maintain a state-of-the-art knowledge in High-Performance Computing, Machine Learning, Large Language Models (LLM ~ AI) and a watching brief on Quantum Computing such that LIBRTI plans leverage what is feasible in the coming decade. This is a complex task in a rapidly and radically changing environment, where trade-offs must consider moving too slowly vs adopting before full risks are understood.
• Act as senior line manager and technical manager, coaching and coordinating a team of LIBRTI scientists to support the derisking, design, delivery and dissemination of LIBRTI digital outputs (ranging from new physics models encapsulated in code to fundamental maths on error covariance).
• Ensure alignment of opportunity and integration of LIBRTI effort with relevant UKAEA programmes (STEP, STRIDE, UKRI Research, with respect to R&D on tritium physics, integrated systems code, nuclear data).
• Leverage the wider UKAEA capabilities in the Tritium, Technology, Robotics, Computing and Materials divisions to the benefit of LIBRTI.
• Promote LIBRTI internationally, representing UKAEA in international forums such as conferences and open code coordination workshops, data committees.

What You’ll Bring

• PhD Scientist and Subject Matter Expert in a fusion related field (own publication / patent portfolio)
• Portfolio of evidence for coordinating activity across business stakeholders to deliver operational outputs for hardware.
• Portfolio of evidence for engaging senior stakeholders in industry and academia to contracted new projects in fusion.
• Portfolio of evidence for managing budgeted work and team (e.g. budget recons, progress to plan, control of risk).
• Demonstrable success in creating and managing an applied science R&D team with strong publication trajectory (average one paper/patent per person per year).
• Portfolio of evidence of building relationships and networks with other Research Institutes / Boards / Bodies to contracted collaborations.
• Experience representing UK / UKAEA in an external STEM Board / Panel / Committee.
• Proven ability to interact efficiently with people in a variety of different work situations to solve problems.
• Fluent written and spoken English
• MS Office literacy (WORD, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Project)

UKAEA is an onsite organisation, and this role requires regular onsite presence (usually 5 days in any given week) in line with business needs. We actively support flexible working arrangements where this is compatible with the role.

Benefits 

We have a generous range of benefits (see the full list here) and highlights include:   

• A salary of £94,758 (inclusive of a 8,000 specialist allowance)   
• Up to 7% corporate performance bonus
• Final salary defined benefits pension scheme with an equivalent of 21.5% employer pension contribution  
• 25 days annual leave plus 2.5 'privilege' days; 8 Bank Holidays
• Additional 3 days of site closure over Christmas break  
• Flexible working options plus family-friendly leave provisions  

Our commitment to ED&I 

UKAEA's mission is clean energy for all, and we welcome talented people from all backgrounds to help us achieve this goal. We are committed to equality, diversity, inclusion and accessibility, and strive to ensure fair representation across our workforce. 

Please email [email protected] if you have any questions or require adjustments to help you participate fairly in our recruitment process, for example changes to the way we interview or share information. As a Disability Confident Employer, we are committed to providing an inclusive and accessible recruitment experience for all candidates. 

We particularly encourage applications from groups currently underrepresented in STEM, including women and people from diverse ethnic backgrounds. All appointments are made on merit and further information can be found here.   

Qualifications

Additional Information

Salary: £94,758 (inclusive of Specialist Allowance) + excellent benefits including outstanding pension