System Engineer for the Africa Millimetre Telescope

In 2019, the first ever picture of a black hole was published by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration, and in 2022 the first picture of the black hole in the centre of our Milky Way. Heino Falcke (Radboud University) was one of the founding members of EHT and a leader in making those images. To build upon the current science with EHT, Falcke and co-PI's Sera Markoff (University of Amsterdam) and Rob Fender (Oxford University), together with the University of Namibia and Turku University, received a €14m Synergy grant from the European Research Council 2023. The project 'BlackHolistic, making colour movies of black holes' focuses on better understanding the inner working of supermassive black holes and stellar mass black holes. To achieve these goals the EHT network has to be expanded with a new mm-wave radio telescope in Africa, more specifically, in Namibia: the Africa Millimetre Telescope (AMT).

The AMT project is embedded in the Radboud Radio Lab (RRL). With funding secured for the next decade, RRL is leading the effort to realise the telescope in Namibia in close collaboration with the University of Namibia and many international partners such as the institute for mm-wave radio astronomy in Grenoble, IRAM. RRL is a dedicated lab of the department of Astrophysics at Radboud University whose main aim is to develop instrumentation for astronomical research. Other projects for which RRL offers expertise are BlackGem, the Pierre Auger Observatory, NCLE and ESA's moon programme.

The AMT team is now expanding its effort to realise the AMT and is gearing up to the formal start of construction mid-2024. To lead the design and engineering efforts of the AMT project, the AMT team is seeking an experienced System Engineer. You will report to the AMT Project Director and PI and work closely together with colleagues from other projects who are involved in the development of astronomical instrumentation for other wavelength domains (both ground-based and space-based applications).

The AMT team is a diverse team in terms of skills, experience, background, abilities and gender. We encourage everyone who thinks they are suitable for this position to apply.

Radboud University
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