PhD Opportunities
This page details PhD projects of which we are aware. This list is by no means exhaustive and the institutions listed, and others, may well be offering additional projects. Further details for many of these projects are already available on institutional websites. For UK PhD programmes, note that application deadlines can be as early as January, and interviews usually take place during the period January-April.
This list relies on supervisors submitting details of their projects. If you are advertising a PhD currently, please submit it using the form linked below:
PhD position in Palaeobiology and Palaeoecology of early arthropods
Expected start: April 2027, or upon mutual agreement
Contract length: 4 years
Supervision: Harriet B Drage (UNIGE)
Workplace: Department of Earth Sciences, University of Geneva
A major goal of palaeontology is having accurate and well-informed reconstructions of the ecologies of ancient animals. This is key to our understanding of the broad-scale development of life on Earth and global ecosystems. Arthropods are the most abundant and diverse group of animals throughout Earth’s history, comprising >80% of described species, living across the globe, and displaying a broad range of morphologies that may represent the earliest adaptations to key ecological niches. RECO-ECO is an ERC-funded project focusing on testing the ecologies of the Earth’s earliest arthropods. This interdisciplinary research will bring together palaeobiology, ecology, geology, and fluid dynamics to test the potential ecological adaptations of different arthropod morphologies that may have allowed them to dominate life in Earth’s oceans. We will develop comprehensive and innovative methods to directly test palaeoecological hypotheses using both fluid dynamics simulations and experiments, which will be applicable across the study of life on Earth.
https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101219676
Your responsibilities:
We are pleased to announce a fully funded PhD position within the RECO-ECO ERC project focusing on testing the hydrodynamic adaptations of juvenile trilobite morphologies, and their impact on dispersal in the Cambrian and Ordovician oceans. The PhD student will: (1) Work with the PI in developing comprehensive computational and experimental fluid dynamics methods, then use these to test ecological hypotheses and contrast this to fossil record data. (2) Simulate dispersal of these animals in water, and assess their dispersal capabilities. (3) Use the resulting data for broad-scale biogeographic analyses integrating continental plate and ocean current models to determine whether their ecological adaptations facilitated arthropod dispersal in Earth’s early oceans.
The PhD student will be supervised by Dr Drage, and will closely collaborate with several international colleagues, primarily Prof. Minter (University of Portsmouth, UK) and Dr Pates (UCL, UK). The student will be based at the University of Geneva, Department of Earth Sciences, and is funded as part of an ERC Starting Grant. Part of the role will involve teaching assistance, supervising Bachelors or Masters students, and helping within the department.
The PI is strongly committed to furthering equality, diversity and inclusion, and to developing a respectful and fair work culture with equal access to opportunities, development, and support. Applications from under-represented groups and women are strongly encouraged. The position is open to all nationalities.
Your qualifications:
• Masters degree in Palaeontology, Earth Sciences, Evolutionary Biology, Ecology, or related field
• Excellent written and spoken English
• Experience in ecology and quantitative palaeo/biology desired, while an interest in physics (fluid dynamics) is highly beneficial
• Experience with statistical analysis, coding (R or Python), and digital modelling strongly preferred
• Willingness to travel (minimum to UK for experimental work), enthusiasm for both experimental work and computational analyses, and enjoy developing new methods
What the position offers you:
You will join a new lab at the University of Geneva on a particularly interdisciplinary project with strongly established international collaborations. As a result, you will travel internationally to collaborators’ labs to learn different approaches and develop your own research network. You will receive one-on-one training in a variety of research skills, including fluid dynamics methods, quantitative palaeontological analysis, field work, and scientific publishing. You will develop strong skills in handling datasets, biogeographic analysis, digital modelling, fluid dynamics, and coding (R, Python). This will equip you with a multidisciplinary skillset that will provide a strong foundation for positions in earth system sciences and biology. You will also have the opportunity to learn a multitude of other skills, including in project management, writing and editing, presenting, open science practises, etc., which are highly transferable to roles within and outside academia.
The Department at the University of Geneva is diverse and engaging, covering a wide range of research topics in the earth sciences and biology. The student will belong to the Doctoral Program in Earth Surface Processes and Paleobiosphere (https://earth-processes.cuso.ch), which provides many opportunities for professional and personal development in research and transferable skills, including funded meetings, field courses and workshops. The position is fully funded, and the salary is highly competitive internationally.
Application:
Deadline: 16/10/2026
To apply, please send the documents below as a single PDF file, in English, with the subject line “PhD application_[yourlastname]” to harriet.drage@unige.ch:
• Detailed CV including any research experience and publications
• Statement describing your research interests and motivation for the project (maximum 2 pages)
• Academic transcripts from your degree/s (in English or French)
• Contact information for 2 professional references
The impact of death and decay on the early animal biosphere
The Ediacaran Period (~635–539 Ma) represents one of Earth's most crucial biosphere transitions, culminating in the emergence of complex animal life. Carbon cycling during this interval was markedly unstable, characterised by extreme isotopic excursions whose drivers remain poorly constrained. The emergence of widespread animal life, found in the fossil record as the Avalon assemblage would almost certainly influence organic carbon burial and carbon cycling. However, little is known about the extent and strength of the mechanistic biological processes that contributed to carbon cycling on a community level, and its this community level that biological and ecological processes act on, then scale up to macroecological levels. Understanding how these animals processed, exported, and/or changed organic matter type, distribution and cycling has direct bearing on our interpretation of the early animal biosphere, and on the interpretation of the atmospheric spectra of exoplanets.
This project will transform our understanding of Ediacaran carbon cycling by quantifying the influence of early animals on carbon flow, particularly the neglected ivesheadiomorphs of the Avalon assemblage. While understanding early animals is hampered by the paucity of analogues with modern animals, the exceptional, in-situ, census preservation of thousands of specimens enables robust quantitative community analyses, rarely applicable in the fossil record, to be used to test hypotheses about early animal life. Drawing on exceptional Newfoundland and southern England fossil localities, the student will focus on quantify the different ways that Avalonian animals could have changed carbon cycling, both when alive and when dead.
The student will conduct systematic fieldwork at key Avalon assemblage localities in Newfoundland (Mistaken Point, Ferryland) and Charnwood Forest, UK, to document ivesheadiomorph occurrences within their palaeocommunity context. Using high-resolution laser-scanning, photogrammetry and image analysis, they will produce quantitative census data on ivesheadiomorph morphology, size-frequency distributions, and spatial relationships with co-occurring Ediacaran taxa. These empirical data will then be used to build carbon flow models of the ecosystems, using agent based models to reconstruct how ivesheadiomorphs decomposed and what proportion of their biomass would have entered the sedimentary organic carbon pool. Together, this palaeobiological framework will allow robust estimates of standing biomass and carbon flux attributable to ivesheadiomorphs, forming the biological foundation from which their broader impact on Ediacaran carbon cycling can be evaluated.
Eco-evolutionary dynamics of early animals
Life has existed on Earth for more than 3.5 billion years, but it is only around 600 million years ago, during the Ediacaran time period (635 – 541 Ma), that animals appear in the rock record. It is during the Ediacaran animals evolved some of their most important traits: most obviously large body-size but also tissue-differentiation, mobility, bilateral symmetry and ecosystem engineering (reef-building). Over the last ten years, mathematical ecological approaches have demonstrated how previously elusive biological details can be extracted from the Ediacaran fossil record. This proposal will tap into the exceptionally rich biological information captured in the Ediacaran fossil record and use using mathematical models to investigate the underlying processes that drive the evolution of early animals.
This project will use theoretical models of Ediacaran communities to investigate taxa life-history traits and use these traits to develop dynamic models of Ediacaran eco-evolutionary dynamics to investigate how difference processes influence Ediacaran evolution. In contrast to modern marine systems, the oldest Ediacaran benthic organisms do not interact much with each other, i.e. resource competition, facilitation and mutualisms are relatively limited. Instead, reproductive dynamics appears key to Ediacaran life. Mechanistic models can be used to investigate these different processes, with the outputs compared to the available data to determine which models best reflect observed diversity patterns, and so which processes are key.
The student will have access to an extensive photographic and laser-scan data dataset of Ediacaran communities and use this data alongside existing analyses to document life-history traits such as reproductive modes and the strength and extent of environmental and competitive interactions within and between species within these communities. They will use this information to parameterise different types of models, and explore how changing different variables, such as the proportion of sexual to asexual reproduction, or the extent of resource competition, impacts speciation rates. The impact of these different processes on the origins of evolutionary innovations throughout the Ediacaran can also be explored.