Senior research engineer within Theoretical Biology

Skilled and committed employees are a crucial factor in the success of Linköping University. And we need more of them. Our core expertise comes from teachers and researchers, but a successful university requires experienced and motivated employees in many fields. Everyone is important. We need to recruit many new employees thanks to, among all, an expansion in our research activity. We need you here. We look forward to receiving your application!

The Department of Physics, Chemistry and Biology conducts research and offers education at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Research, the predominant activity, is often done in collaboration with corporate and international partners. We are one of the university’s largest, oldest and most well known departments, encompassing five interacting scientific fields: biology, chemistry, material physics, applied physics and theory and modelling.
Read more at https://liu.se/en/organisation/liu/ifm

We are looking for a senior research engineer within the department of Physics, Chemistry and Biology (IFM), division Theoretical Biology. 

Your future work assignments 
Your tasks will consist of developing a model which create gridded datasets (maps) of future land use that are expressed as scenarios with regards to multiple resources. This will involve working with an interdisciplinary team to process non-spatial data into a set of rules and create a model that can process said rules and validating the model with existing spatial data. The co-worker will need to iteratively develop the model. First to validate the status quo and then to create two future scenarios in order to produce gridded datasets. They can then be run by the other team members in various evaluation models. Because this will be an iterative (and creative) process, strong team skills will be required.

Your future workplace
You will work as a member of the Sustainable Natural Resource Management lab, which is part of the division of Theoretical Biology at IFM, and does research that aims to transform how we manage resources to ensure food security and water quality around the world with a special focus on cities and their relationship to their agricultural hinterlands. We mix quantitative and qualitative approaches, and collaborate widely across disciplines and with stakeholders, to answer research questions from a systemic perspective.

The position as a researcher is announced as part of the research project ‘Optimally recycling organic waste to support food and energy production in Sweden’. The aim is to help diverse Swedish stakeholders in the food, energy, waste, and transport sector assess the logistical requirements of recycling the nutrients and energy contained in organic waste. These efforts are focused on a 2030 vision of a nationally sustainable food system, and determining how these requirements will affect multiple sustainable development goals. It is a collaboration among environmental sciences, mathematics, and engineering. We will use quantitative resource mapping, optimization modeling and life cycle assessment to evaluate the scenarios from multiple angles. Once the datasets are constructed there will be a lot of room to use them to answer diverse types of research questions, and we welcome the researcher to contribute to these new endeavors.

Your qualifications
We are looking for someone who has a PhD (or equivalent experience) in computer modeling, spatial modeling, or a related discipline. We aim to hire a motivated person with good initiative and organizational skills, and with the ability to work independently.

You should have advanced Python and/or R skills (or suitable alternative), experience with super or cloud computing, experience manipulating datasets so that they can be seamlessly run in a model and track record of clear methodological documentation (metadata, user protocols, trouble shooting).

Qualifying are familiarity with publicly available Swedish land use, population, agricultural census, and climate datasets, experience with nutrient and/or energy budgets and visualization and experience with QGIS, ArcGIS, or other non-modeler interface to create easy to use maps.

Form of employment 
The contract will be for one year full time as a researcher with the potential to extend the contract.

Starting date
By agreement.

Salary
The university applies individual salaries. Please indicate salary demands in the application.

Union representatives
For contact with union representatives see below.

Application
To apply, please register your profile and attach your application documents via the link below no later than March 3, 2020. Applications received after the deadline will not be considered.


Linköping University will continue to develop as an attractive and creative place of work, characterized by equal terms and actively works for equality and diversity.

We look forward to receiving your application!


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