Postdoctoral Research Assistant

Location: Singleton Campus, Swansea

About The University

Swansea University is a research-led university that has been making a difference since 1920. The University community thrives on exploration and discovery and offers the right balance of excellent teaching and research, matched by an enviable quality of life.

Our stunning waterfront campuses and multicultural community make us a desirable workplace for colleagues from around the world. Our reward and benefits, and ways of working enable those who join us to have enriching careers, matched by an excellent work-life balance.

About The Role

We are seeking a statistical ecologist with experience of multi-variate time-series analysis, to work on a NERC-funded project “Multigenerational Trophic Responses to Coupled Short- and Long-term Environmental Change” for up to 6 months. Our project combines theoretical and empirical approaches to explore how a Host-Parasitoid system responds to short- and long-term changes in the environment, collaborating with Dr Steve Sait’s experimental Plodia–Venturia system at the University of Leeds and Prof Chenggui Yuan in the Dept of Mathematics at Swansea. The project will develop our understanding of how populations respond across multiple generations to qualitatively different forms of temperature change, in the presence and absence of natural enemies, to determine whether previous investigations of the impacts of climate change have excluded fundamental biological processes from their designs.

The work will be carried out with Prof Mike Fowler https://www.swansea.ac.uk/staff/m.s.fowler within the Dept of Biosciences the Centre for Biomathematics at Swansea https://biomaths.swansea.ac.uk 

Responsibilities include analysing simulated and corresponding experimental Host-Parasitoid time-series of environmental and population dynamics, to understand climate-responses of trophic interactions. The successful candidate will generate original ideas, contribute to research papers and conference presentations describing the results of the research; interact positively and professionally with project collaborators and elsewhere in the University and beyond as appropriate; and keep informed of developments in the field in technical, specific and general terms and their wider implication for the discipline area and the knowledge economy.

The successful candidate must have completed (or recently submitted) a PhD in Statistics, Biological Sciences, Mathematics, Physics or equivalent, and demonstrate evidence of actively leading and collaborating in writing and publishing research papers for peer-reviewed journals. They must also have demonstrable ability to conduct research in line with the objectives of the project, including experience with common programming environments like R, MatLab, Mathematica, etc.

Closing Date: 21 February 2025

Interview Date: 3 March 2025

Informal Enquiries

• Prof Mike Fowler m.s.fowler@swansea.ac.uk
• Prof Chenggui Yuan c.yuan@swansea.ac.uk

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