Postdoctoral position in Scientific software development

Information about the research
The objective of this post-doctoral research project is to significantly advance the state-of-the-art in the construction of atomic scale models of materials. To this end, you will implement and develop supervised and unsupervised model construction techniques that enable rapid and semi-automated model construction for materials research. Specifically, these techniques will be designed for future users of the European Spallation Source (ESS) that is currently being built in southern Sweden.

The project will heavily benefit from the extensive code and method development in our group during the course of the last years. The aim is to systematically integrate these tools with machine learning techniques and improve the usability of the resulting tools to a level that makes them accessible to researchers with limited background in theory and modeling of materials.

Due to its integrated and challenging nature this project will be carried out in close collaboration between the Materials and Surface Theory group at the Department of Physics at Chalmers University of Technology (Gothenburg, Sweden) and the ESS Data Management and Software Centre (Copenhagen, Denmark). While a strong emphasis will be placed on method and code development, there will be various opportunities to apply the new methods to interesting and challenging problems in current materials research pertaining for example to energy harvesting from solar, thermal, and fusion sources. To this end, we can rely on close collaborations with excellent experimental groups at Chalmers as well as abroad.

Additional information about the partners involved
The Materials and Surface Theory group at the Department of Physics (http://www.materialsmodeling.com) focuses on the application of electronic structure and atomic-scale simulation methods to address current problems in materials science. Many of our research activities concern materials of interest for energy harvesting from solar, thermal, and fusion sources. In these areas we work closely with several experimental and theory groups both nationally and internationally. At the moment the division comprises two faculty members, seven Ph.D. students, one post-docs, and a scientific computation expert, providing a stimulating, motivating, and collaborative research environment.

The European Spallation Source (ESS) at the European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) is a multi-disciplinary research facility based on the world’s most powerful neutron source currently under construction in Lund, Sweden. The Postdoctoral researcher will collaborate with the Data Analysis and Modeling group located at the ESS Data Management and Software Centre in Copenhagen, Denmark. The group's mission is to deliver the software and modeling tools that are critical for analyzing and understanding experimental data from ESS. As such the group's activities span from software engineering, data analysis, instrument simulations, to atomic-scale modeling and simulations – always with the aim of providing useful tools for the neutron scattering community and the future users of ESS. The group engages actively in open source projects, primarily based on C++ and Python, and in research with universities.

Major responsibilities

• Scientific software engineering
• Collaboration with the European Spallation Source ERIC and potential user community
• Evaluation and testing
• Documentation

Your major responsibility as postdoc is to perform your own research in a research group. An important aspect involves collaboration within academia and with society at large. The position is meritorious for future research duties within academia as well as industry/the public sector.

The position will be placed in the Materials and Surface Theory Division at the Department of Physics at Chalmers University of Technology (Gothenburg, Sweden) under the supervision of Assoc. Prof. Paul Erhart. A substantial part of the project work will be carried out at the ESS Data Management and Software Centre in Copenhagen, Denmark under the supervision of Dr. Thomas Holm Rod.

Position summary
Full-time temporary employment. The position is limited to a maximum of two years (1+1).

Qualifications
To qualify for the position of postdoc, you must have a doctoral degree in physics or chemistry; the degree should generally not be older than three years. You need to have a strong interest in computational modeling of materials with demonstrated expertise in at least two of the following areas:

• electronic structure calculations
• atomic scale simulations
• interatomic potential development
• machine learning
• code development in python and C or C++
• software engineering

You should enjoy working in a collaborative environment including interactions with both theoreticians and experimentalists.

Chalmers continuously strives to be an attractive employer. Equality and diversity are substantial foundations in all activities at Chalmers.

Application procedure
The application should be marked with Ref 20160444 and written in English. The application should be sent electronically via Chalmers webpage.


Application deadline: 5 December 2016

For questions, please contact:
Assoc. Prof. Paul Erhart,
Materials and Surface Theory,
erhart@chalmers.se,  
+46 31-772 3669