PhD student: Risk assessment and modelling of drinking water sources

Information about the division
The successful candidate will become a member of the drinking water research group DRICKS at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. The candidate will work at the divisions of GeoEngineering (GEO) and Water Environment Technology (WET), which are a part of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Chalmers University of Technology.

GEO and WET bring together scientists with expertise in risk assessment and decision analysis, engineering geology, process engineering, hydraulics, environment, and sustainability. Research is performed in a number of research fields, including drinking water, wastewater, and stormwater engineering, contaminated areas, hydrology in soil and rocks.

Major responsibilities
Contamination of drinking water sources is a potential health risk to drinking water consumers. Contaminants can enter the drinking water source from a variety of sources located in the catchment area, e.g. agricultural land, wastewater treatment plants, on-site sewers. A major challenge is to assess the risk associated with different contamination sources in an accurate and reasonable manner, and to evaluate possible mitigation measures.

In order to identify and prioritise cost-effective and sustainable mitigation measures to decrease consumer health risks, alternative measures need to be carefully evaluated with respect to, e.g.: the contribution of each contamination source to the total contamination load, the resulting risk to consumers, the costs associated with the mitigation measure, and the possible risk reduction and other effects.

The overall aim of this project is to provide decision support for cost-effective and sustainable reduction of public health risks by means of mitigation measures within the catchment area of drinking water sources.

Important aspects of the project are:
- to develop a method for combining risk assessment of catchment areas with cost-benefit analysis;
- to apply hydrologic modelling of contaminant fate and transport to assess risks;
- to provide good examples by means of case studies.

This is a multi-disciplinary project between drinking water engineering, risk assessment, economy and to some extent mathematical statistics.

As a PhD student you are expected to work independently; have the ability to plan and organise your work; to be able to work in close collaboration with other group members and partners; and to be able to communicate scientific results, both orally and in written form in English. Knowledge of Swedish is advantageous due to close collaboration with Swedish stakeholders.

You are expected to participate in teaching Bachelor and Master level courses in the field of civil and environmental engineering. Bachelor courses are taught in Swedish, and applicants that do not have Swedish as a native language should be able to teach in Swedish within two years of employment. Chalmers offers courses in Swedish language.

Position summary
Full-time temporary employment. The position is limited to a maximum of five years.

Qualifications
Applicants should have a Master of Science Degree corresponding to at least 240 higher education credits in Civil and/or Environmental Engineering, GeoSciences or a closely related field. Experience and/or education in any or several of the following fields are advantageous: drinking water, risk assessment, cost-benefit analysis, hydrology, hydrogeology, modelling, statistics, geographic information systems (GIS).

Application procedure
The application should be marked with Ref 20140166 and written in English. The application should be sent electronically via Chalmers webpage.

Application deadline: June 1, 2014

For questions, please contact:
Lars Rosén, lars.rosen@chalmers.se, +46 31 772 20 61
Thomas Pettersson, thomas.pettersson@chalmers.se, +46 31 772 21 27




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