We are looking for a candidate to apply to the "Juan de la Cierva formación" postdoctoral call


We are looking for a motivated candidate to apply to a competitive postdoctoral call ("Juan de la Cierva formación") from the Spanish Government that fully fund a 2-yr postdoctoral contract to work in in the Dryland Ecology and Global Change LabThe requeriments of the candidate are the following:

* We are particularly interested in candidates with expertise in any of the following areas: microbial ecology, bioinformatics, lichen taxonomy, biocrust ecology, remote sensing or ecological modelling.

* The candidate should hold a PhD awarded between 1 January 2015 and 31 December 2016.
* The candidate should have a strong publication record, with articles in journals included in the first quartile of the JCR database (the call is highly competitive and succesfull candidates are those with a strong publication record).
* Previous research stays and/or postdoctoral experience outside Spain (for Spanish candidates) or a Phd from a non-Spanish university (for candidates from outside Spain). 

Please note that this is not a job offer, as the candidate will apply to a competitive call. All the details of this call can be found here (in Spanish). If awarded, the person would work in a state-of-the-art facilities in the Móstoles Campus of Rey Juan Carlos University, including a brand new and well equiped laboratory and access to the Aranjuez Experimental Station and the Climate Change Outdoor Laboratory in the university campus (Fig. 1). He/she would be part of the research team working in the BIODESERT project, awarded to Fernando T. Maestre by the Consolidator Grant program of the European Research Council for the period 2016-2020. This project has the following main objectives:
  1. To test how changes in climate and grazing pressure determine spatiotemporal patterns in multifunctionality in global drylands.
  2. To assess how biotic attributes modulate ecosystem resilience to climate change and grazing pressure at multiple spatial scales (from local to global).
  3. To test and develop early warning indicators for the onset of desertification.
  4. To forecast the onset of desertification and its ecological consequences under different climate and grazing scenarios.

Interested candidates in applying to this call in the lab should send their updated CV and three references to Fernando T. Maestre before 31 December 2016. The selected applicant will be notified by 6th of January 2017, and will need to prepare all the materials requested by the call before the 20th of January.









Figure 1. Views of the Climate Change Outdoor laboratory, where highly replicated climate change experiments can be set up.