A position as Postdoctoral Research Fellow in bioinformatics of eDNA is available at the Arctic University Museum of Norway, UiT. The appointment is for two years. The workplace is at UiT in Tromsø. You must be able to start in the position no later than 6 months after receiving the offer. You will conduct research as a part of the newly established Norwegian Centre for Arctic Ecosystem Genomics (ArcEcoGen) and will be part of the methodological development working group.
Research at ArcEcoGen focuses on the combined effect of humans, climate, and biota on northern ecosystem dynamics in the past, present, and future using environmental DNA (eDNA) techniques. A key goal of ArcEcoGen is to build up a diverse, rigorous, and internationally leading research group in ecosystem genomics. Norway has among the world’s best coverage of local flora and fauna in DNA reference libraries, with nearly 20,000 species barcoded. In addition, the large natural history collections at The Museum will be available for creating complementary reference libraries. Our collections also include sediment samples from arctic and alpine lakes as well as DNA extracts from sediments and organisms. We also have fully equipped laboratories and infrastructure for recovery and analyses of modern, ancient, and eDNA, as well as field equipment for sediment coring. We are currently recruiting PhDs, Post Docs, and associate professors as a part of a recent Aurora Centre funding award.
The position will focus on developing new methods for processing and annotating DNA metabarcoding data. Our group has been analysing modern and ancient environmental samples using DNA metabarcoding for many years. We have a large collection of datasets corresponding to these samples, and a great deal of expertise on how to process them modularly. We now want to take advantage of this data collection to develop an efficient machine learning-based system capable of establishing cleaning and annotation rules for multiple broad taxonomic groups conditional on the ecosystem studied. The rules and annotations proposed by the system can be compared with those established empirically. While the architecture of the system remains to be defined in collaboration with the person recruited, it should be based on a database that can archive all the raw data and their annotation, and on, for example, a machine learning system backed up by this database. The position holder will also participate in teaching, outreach, and assistance to the ArcEcoGen members. It is expected that the position holder will participate in research group collaboration and professional networks nationally and internationally and will also be encouraged to obtain external funding from national and international funding agencies (e.g. RCN/EU).
Application deadline is April 27th 2022. Please see the following link for the full position description and how to apply:
