PhD: Cenozoic biogeographic evolution of deep sea ecosystems

PhD position in paleobiology

In the frame of a VR-funded project on the ’Cenozoic biogeographic evolution of deep sea ecosystems’, a 4 year PhD position is open at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm. The goal of this project is to understand how mollusks at deep-sea methane seeps have evolved and dispersed through the world’s oceans during the past 50 million years. This will be achieved by collecting new fossil material in three key regions across the globe, integrating these new data with existing datasets, and analyzing these data using state-of-the-art computational methods including phylogenetics, network analysis, and Bayesian modeling, among others. The Swedish Museum of Natural History is a world-class research institution offering an inspiring and interdisciplinary research environment across the Earth and Life Sciences. #

Your tasks include:

•  participation in field work in remote areas,
• preparation and identification of invertebrate fossils,
• develop and apply computational methods to analyze phylogenetic and distribution data,
• scientific publication and presentation.

Requirements/qualifications:

• MSc degree or equivalent in paleontology, or in biology if you have a geo/paleo background (required),
• physical strength and willingness to participate in field work,
• experience with invertebrate taxonomy, preferably mollusks,
• programming skills in R and/or Python,
• experience with phylogenetics software (i.e., MrBayes, BEAST…),
• good knowledge of English (written and oral).

The position is for four years. A new position as a PhD student is first for one year and then normally renewed for up to two years at a time.

For further information please contact Dr. Steffen Kiel (steffen.kiel@nrm.se). Union representative is Emily Dock Åkerman, SACO-S. Both can be reached at +46 8 519 540 00.

Application:

Provide a short letter explaining why you are interested in this position, a CV, certificates, and names and contact details of two academic referees. Please send all documents as a single pdf file to rekrytering@nrm.se or to Swedish Museum of Natural History, Box 50007, SE-104 05 Stockholm, Sweden, no later than January 27, 2017. Mark your application with dnr 2.3.1-768-2016.