We are looking for a candidate to apply to a competitive postdoctoral call ("María Zambrano") from the University of Alicante

 

We are looking for a motivated candidate to apply to a competitive postdoctoral call ("María Zambrano") from the University of Alicante that fully funds a 2-yr postdoctoral contract to work in in the Dryland Ecology and Global Change Lab. The requirements of the candidate we are looking for are the following:

* We are particularly interested in candidates with expertise in any of the following areas: microbial ecology, network analysis, macroecology, biogeochemistry/soil science, communtiy ecology, remote sensing, ecological modelling, data science.
* The candidate nees to have at least 24 months of postdoctoral experience outside Spain (or within Spain but at universities/research centers different from the place where he/she carried out her PhD) by the end of the call (6 June 2022).

* The candidate must be working outside Spain by 6 June 2022
* The candidate should have a strong publication record, with articles in journals included in the first quartile of the JCR database (At the Maestre lab do not care about the journal impact factor nor the total number of publications when hiring researchers but the panels/reviewers of this call do and the call is highly competitive, so successful candidates are those with a strong publication record in these journals).
* Having a good knowledge of the use of the statistical software R and be familiar with the analyses of multivariate, complex datasets is a plus! 

 

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 brand new, state-of-the-art building where the Multidisciplinary Institute for Environment Studies "Ramon Margalef” of the University of Alicante is located, and will have access to experimental. Alicante is very lively city by the beach with a high quality of life (and some of the best paella in the world!), and the University of Alicante has a beautiful campus.  

The candidate is free to pursue his/her main research interests/projects , but please note that the contract does not come with any amount for research expenses (and I cannot support research expenses not related to my ongoing research projects). Priorities will be given, however, to candidates with interests on working with  existing data and ongoing experiments. These include data from: i) the BIODESERT project, awarded to Fernando T. Maestre by the Consolidator Grant program of the European Research Council for the period January 2016- June 2022. Data from this project already available include a large database on ecosystem structural and functional attributes (including multiple ecosystem functions and diversity/composition data of vegetation a soil microbial communities) from a global survey collected in 326 drylands from around the world, which are suitable to work on multiple questions related to the interest of the candidates, and ii) global field data on soil microbial communities, vegetation and multiple ecosystem functions/services gathered from 332 ecosystems (including all major biomes) from all continents collaboration with Manuel Delgado-Baquerizo from IRNAS-CSIC. Other interesting data available are those from ongoing mid-term (11-13 yrs) climate change experiments from different Spanish drylands (for examples of previous results from these experiments see here or here)

 

The Dryland Ecology and Global Change Lab is a healthy, collaborative and people-centered workplace where the health, wellbeing and professional development of its members is a priority and harassment and discrimination (of any form) is not tolerated. More details about the lab phylosophy can be found here.

Interested candidates in applying to this call in the lab should get in contact with  Fernando T. Maestre before 25 May 2022. The selected applicant will be notified by 30th of May 2022, and will need to prepare all the materials requested by the call before the 3rd of June 2022. Please note that the official information is in Spanish.