Postdoctoral position (2 years)

The Department of Physics at Umeå University has a staff of approximately 90 people, including 13 professors, 28 researchers/teachers with a PhD degree, approximately 35 PhD students, a technical/administrative staff of about ten, and several individuals in temporary employment positions such as post docs.The department pursues active research in the areas of interdisciplinary physics of complex systems, optical physics, condensed matter physics, plasma and space physics, and theoretical physics.We are now looking for an exceptional postdoctoral associate to join our interdisciplinary group at the newly started Integrated Science Lab, where we work on solving life-science oriented problems using tools from physics, mathematics and statistics.The expected start date is April 15, 2010.Our research focuses on understanding the large-scale organization of social, biological and technological systems.Most projects are data-driven-we start with a dataset that we then develop methods to analyze.We work much with computational analysis methods and mechanistic models.Sometimes these are complemented by analytical methods.We try to be open to both more mechanistic approaches (simple toy models to find microscopic mechanisms behind large-scale phenomena) and more prediction-oriented methods (data-mining, machine learning, etc.).In social systems, we are interested in how disease and information spreads over social networks.The datasets we use are based on e.g.online communication and the flow of patients in healthcare systems.For technological networks, we investigate how economic agreements affect traffic routing and growth of the Internet, and how to optimize the topology of overlays in wireless networks.In biology we study general principles of biological organization.In particular we investigate modularity and robustness in biochemical and gene networks.To qualify for the position you should have a Ph.D.degree or equivalent, preferably not more than 3 years old, and a good experience in working with large datasets.We encourage applicants of different backgrounds (but still with an expert knowledge of the topics listed above), like sociologists, engineers, or biologists; and applicants with good programming skills.Applications for the position should include a description of past research accomplishments, a curriculum vitae, transcripts of degree certificates, a publication list and reprints/copies of published work according to this list, and names of references.Applications will be discarded or, if the applicant so wishes, returned two years after the position has been filled.Documents sent electronically should be in MS Word or PDF format.