Research Fellow

About us

NESTLER is a joint project between the EU and African member states designed to promote One-Health sustainable partnership. The project aims to bring together interdisciplinary technological advances to monitor effectively the well-being of animals, plants, and humans in a holistic approach.

We are offering a Postdoctoral Research Fellow position within the NESTLER project, to work within an exciting multidisciplinary team working on crop monitoring, characterisation and yield modelling and optimisation.

About the role

The main duties and responsibilities will be:

• Investigate and design state-of-the-art environmental sensors for both soil and atmospheric conditions, with the aim to improve current sensor technologies, focusing on enhancing their accuracy, durability, and/or cost-effectiveness.
• Develop an optimised IoT sensing network to capture environmental data that are critical to crop production (the target crop for this project is cassava).
• Develop a crop growth and yield simulation model and calibrate it using the newly acquired data.
• Lead the application of machine learning approaches to identify patterns in cassava yield from farm-level data, data captured from field sensors as well as remote sensing data.
• Identification of the largest uncertainty factors in the yield model and improvement of model performance using artificial intelligence methods
• Support the development of climate change impact scenarios for cassava yield using the model.
• Contribute to the overarching goals of the research project team, by participating in meetings, contributing to research publications, and presenting your work at conferences.

The post is available until 30th August 2025 in the first instance. Further funding to support the post may be available.

About you

The ideal candidate must have a PhD degree (or about to submit) in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science or a related discipline. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of this research, experience or passion for agricultural, Geo-, or environmental sciences, will be highly valuable.

The following will constitute a distinct advantage:

• Knowledge of electronic, sensor, RF and microwave circuit design and familiarity with test and measurement techniques
• Knowledge of IoT and sensor networks design and implementation
• Programming experience in Python, R, C and/or C++
• Experience in using simulation models and machine-learning techniques
• Good command of multi-variate statistics as well as script programming
• Excellent communication skills in English
• Good teamwork skills and willingness to collaborate across disciplines.

Application details:

• Applications close on 12th July 2024 at 23:59
• A job description and person specification can be accessed at the application link, as well as contact details for enquiries about the post.

What we offer

As well as the exciting opportunities this role presents, we also offer some great benefits.

Visit https://www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/reward-and-benefits to find out more

Our commitment to Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

We particularly encourage applications from candidates who are likely to be underrepresented in UCL’s workforce. These include people from Black, Asian and ethnic minority backgrounds; disabled people; LGBTQI+ people; and for our Grade 9 and 10 roles, women.

Our department holds an Athena SWAN Bronze award, in recognition of our commitment to advancing gender equality.

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