Research Associate in Computational Ecology

Location: Silwood Park Campus, Imperial College London, Ascot, UK

We are building a team to create a virtual rainforest: a general ecosystem model replicating all physical and biotic components of the ecosystem and their interactions, with a view to understanding system-level emergent properties.

The virtual rainforest will link all of the biotic and abiotic system components through nutrient cycling, stoichiometric and metabolic processes. It will track the birth, growth and death of cohorts of plant, animal and soil microbial functional groups, and the movement of carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, water and energy through the ecosystem.

At its heart, the virtual rainforest will be an individual-based simulation of plants, animals, microbes and their interactions with the abiotic environment, and which rests upon the key individual-based processes of metabolism, respiration, reproduction and mortality. The virtual rainforest will be used to gain insight into the processes that govern three key, emergent properties of rainforests: their stability, resilience and sustainability.

Ecosystems cannot be understood through piecemeal studies of their individual components. The discipline of tropical forest ecology has at its disposal ever-accumulating datasets examining all aspects of rainforest ecosystems giving insight into everything from the population dynamics of plants through to the scavenging behaviour of ants.

This knowledge allows us to understand much of how the ecosystem operates and the ecosystem services it generates, but in a disjointed fashion. As a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Computational Ecology, you will be part of an attempt to tie that knowledge into a single, comprehensive understanding of how the ecosystem operates in its entirety.

Duties and responsibilities:

You will develop one of the four modules of the virtual rainforest: plant, animal, soil microbial or abiotic processes. You will be assisted in this by additional team members, including your peers, a separately appointed scientific programmer and postgraduate students.

The project provides a generous budget for placements and secondments to give you the freedom to work with, and harness the expertise of, research groups beyond our own.

The virtual rainforest will lean heavily on data collected from the SAFE Project, and you will be required to help with the management of these datasets.

All team members will be expected to help develop the skills and competencies of their peers through the sharing of tasks and knowledge. As part of a research group and environment that extends beyond the virtual rainforest team, you will contribute to the supervision of undergraduate and postgraduate student projects.

You will be given time, resources and encouragement to pursue your professional development, along with opportunities to gain teaching experience in the form of tutorials, lectures, practical classes and field trips.

Essential requirements:

We require team members who provide complementary technical skills and disciplinary knowledge, so applicants from any ecological background and with any relevant skillset are encouraged to apply.

No individual team member is expected to have more than a small subset of this list of topics and skills, and we specifically encourage applicants to clearly identify the subset of skills that they could bring to the team.

Among the team members, we will need understanding of plant, animal and microbial ecology, along with functional ecology, metabolic ecology, ecological stoichiometry, biogeochemistry, hydrology and microclimate processes.

Candidates with an interest in systems ecology and the concepts of stability, resilience and sustainability are particularly encouraged to apply. Some programming experience - preferably in Python - is necessary for all applicants. Experience with either process-based or numeric simulation modelling is desirable, as is experience with error propagation and ecological statistics. We are also seeking experience with version control, unit testing, continuous integration and team programming.

Further Information:

These positions are funded for three years. We encourage applications from candidates that would like full-time or part-time positions on this project and will explore job-sharing arrangements should that be appropriate.

*Candidates who have not yet been officially awarded their PhD will be appointed as a Research Assistant within the salary range £36,045 - £39,183 per annum

Applicants will need to complete an online application, including a CV and cover letter. Cover letters should make clear which module(s) of the virtual rainforest you would be most comfortable contributing to, and what subset of the skills required for the whole team that you would bring.

Closing date: 09/05/2021

To apply, please click Apply Now.