Postdoctoral researcher position in soil nitrogen cycling

2.5-year (minimum) postdoctoral researcher position in soil nitrogen cycling is available within the Archaea Biology and Ecogenomics Group of the Department of Functional and Evolutionary Ecology at the University of Vienna, Austria.

The postdoc will work within the framework of the EC-funded project ‘ACTIONr’ (H2020 project funded under the HORIZON-WIDERA-2021-ACCESS-03-01 Call Twinning). The 3-year project is in collaboration with the University of Thessaly (Prof. Dimitrios Karpouzas and Assistant Prof. Evangelia Papadopoulou) and the Ecology Central Lyon (Prof. Graeme Nicol and Dr. Christina Hazard).

The overall theme of the research programme is to elucidate the interaction of nitrification inhibitors with microbial communities involved in soil nitrogen cycling. The mitigation of reactive N loss via nitrification inhibitors is a promising solution for increasing N use efficiency (NUE) in agriculture. ACTIONr aims to unravel the scientific excellence and innovation potential through a European network of excellence on establishing novel tools and pathways for optimized NUE, reducing the continued acceleration of the N cycle, and decreasing the environmental footprint of reactive N.

The main tasks of the successful candidate will be:

• To analyse the efficiency of different synthetic and biological nitrification inhibitors on AOA and AOB soil isolates in liquid culture studies
• To determine the mode of action of specific synthetic and novel biological nitrification inhibitors at cellular level using transcriptomic and proteomic approaches
• To write scientific papers and present the research on scientific conferences
• To participate and contribute to the dissemination, networking and training activities of the project
• to participate in the supervision of lab work of PhD students from University of Thessaly in the ACTIONr project