Associate Director, Disease and Target Biology

Overview

In this role you lead a front-line team to harness human genetics, multi-omics and patient data to deepen disease understanding and fuel target discovery. You will translate complex evidence into clear decisions, partnering with therapy areas to define the biological evidence needed for advancing targets and programmes in metabolic and cardio-renal diseases. You’ll shape scientific campaigns, guide AI/ML application in disease biology, and develop talent across UK and Denmark. This is a hands-on leadership role that combines strategic direction with bench-level influence, across cross-site teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead and develop a ~7-person scientific team across UK and Denmark, including recruitment and cross-site collaboration
• Identify and stratify patient subgroups using genetics, multi-omics and cohort/patient data to inform target discovery
• Co-lead campaigns with therapeutic area teams, defining evidence for hypothesis support and programme decisions
• Set scientific and operational direction with Data Science leaders and AI & Digital Innovation colleagues
• Guide AI/ML applications in disease biology and collaborate with engineering and external partnerships
• Represent the organization in academic, biotech and industry collaborations
• Provide leadership to ensure a high-performance, well-being focused, cross-site working environment

Key requirements

• PhD in relevant discipline with substantial post-PhD experience
• Experience combining genetics and omics with patient data for disease understanding and target discovery/validation
• At least 5 years of leadership experience in drug/target discovery in pharma/biotech/techbio
• Ability to lead and develop scientific teams across locations and stay hands-on technically
• Strong communication and stakeholder-management skills to influence senior partners

• leadership
• stakeholder-management
• clear scientific communication
• human genetics
• computational biology
• omics

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