Job Category
Student Employee
Job Title
PhD position: Spatial patterns and resilience in tundra community composition
Department
Research | Myers-Smith Lab | Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences | Faculty of Forestry
Posting End Date
April 30, 2024
Note: Applications will be accepted until 11:59 PM on the day prior to the Posting End Date above.
Job End Date
Apr 30, 2025
The annual salary, with tuition and fees included, will be $35,000 CAD per year. Students have the option take on teaching assistant contracts to supplement this funding. Students are encouraged to apply for external scholarships in addition to the base salary for this position.
At UBC, we believe that attracting and sustaining a diverse workforce is key to the successful pursuit of excellence in research, innovation, and learning for all faculty, staff and students. Our commitment to employment equity helps achieve inclusion and fairness, brings rich diversity to UBC as a workplace, and creates the necessary conditions for a rewarding career.
Job Summary
This PhD student position will be in the research group (Team Shrub) of Prof. Isla Myers-Smith in Vancouver, Canada. The research is motivated by the urgent need to understand the effects that global change can have on ecosystems. One area of critical concern is the imminent abrupt and irreversible critical transitions of ecosystems through tipping points. Community composition change in tundra ecosystems could be more gradual or more abrupt, but how this relates to the spatial patterning within tundra communities has yet to be explored. Recent discoveries indicate that such tipping could be evaded and even reversed in ecosystems through spatial pattern formation, thereby creating pathways of resilience. For our ERC-Synergy project Pathways of resilience and evasion of tipping in ecosystems (RESILIENCE) we are offering a PhD position for a self-motivated candidate with a strong scientific background in the fields of ecology, remote sensing, environmental sciences, data science, mathematics or statistics with excellent English language skills.
The aim of RESILIENCE is to fundamentally advance our understanding and predictions of tipping points and critical transitions in ecosystems and reveal how these can be evaded and even reversed through spatial pattern formation. RESILIENCE will develop a new theory for emerging resilience through spatial pattern formation and link this with real tipping-prone biomes undergoing accelerating global change: savanna and tundra. The candidate will benefit from the expertise of the four Principal Investigators (PIs) in the RESILIENCE project: Max Rietkerk, an ecologist at Utrecht University, Arjen Doelman, a mathematician at Leiden University, Ehud Meron, a physicist at Ben-Gurion University, and Isla Myers-Smith, an ecologist at the University of British Columbia.
Organizational Status
The PhD student will report directly to the Principal Investigator. The position is for four years. See offer section below.
Work Performed
The PhD student will come up with research questions, develop data collection protocols, conduct fieldwork and data synthesis, write up manuscripts for publication, make data and code public and communicate the results broadly. The PhD student will work independently, be supported by their PhD committee and participate as a part of the larger Team Shrub and the RESILIENCE project.
Consequence of Error/Judgement
The PhD student will report to the PI and will be required to work independently. The PhD student will also interact with other members of the research group on a regular basis, with other team members contributing to tasks and participating in project and data management and analysis. The PhD student will have responsibility over their own PhD research, but will be working as a part of the larger Team Shrub.
Supervision Received
The PhD student will be supervised by the principle investigator Prof. Isla Myers-Smith with committee members from across the project and at UBC. The PhD student will work with a multidisciplinary team including graduate students, postdocs, a data scientist and will interact with northern partners and project collaborators.
Supervision Given
The PhD student will supervise undergraduate researchers and will have the opportunity to participate in teaching.
Minimum Qualifications
- Willingness to respect diverse perspectives, including perspectives in conflict with one’s own
- Demonstrates a commitment to enhancing one’s own awareness, knowledge, and skills related to equity, diversity, and inclusion
- A MSc degree in ecology, remote sensing, environmental sciences, data science, mathematics, statistics or a related field
- A desire to develop strong quantitative skills
- Interest in interdisciplinary research
- Willingness to participate in fieldwork
- Experience in writing and publishing peer-reviewed articles
- Fluency in verbal and written English
- Excellent oral and written communication skills
- Ability to work independently and lead collaborative research projects
- Interest in working in an interdisciplinary and collaborative environment as a part of a diverse team
Preferred Qualifications
- Knowledge of spatial analysis and Bayesian statistics
- Experience in R and/or Python programming
- Experience using version control software and managing data
- Experience conducting fieldwork
- Experience in northern ecosystems
- Experience piloting drone and working with drone imagery
Offer
You will be offered a full-time four-year position. The annual salary, with tuition and fees included, will be $35,000 CAD per year. Students have the option take on teaching assistant contracts to supplement this funding. Students are encouraged to apply for external scholarships in addition to the base salary for this position.
About the Organization
This position will be based at the Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences, Faculty of Forestry, the University of British Columbia, Vancouver campus, which is located on the territory of the Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm) People.
The University of British Columbia is a global centre for teaching, learning and research, consistently ranked among the top 20 public universities in the world. The University of British Columbia’s (UBC) Faculty of Forestry is recognized globally as one of the leading forestry faculties in the world. As the largest Faculty of Forestry in Canada, we welcome almost 1500 undergraduate and graduate students from over 40 countries every year to study forestry at UBC.
We strive to create a respectful, positive and safe working environment for people of all backgrounds. We believe that inclusiveness and diversity are essential to academic excellence. We encourage members of underrepresented groups to apply including First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples, Indigenous peoples of North America, Black-identified persons, other racialized persons, persons with disabilities, and those who identify as women and/or 2SLGBTQ+.
Additional Information
For more information about this position, please contact Prof. Isla Myers-Smith (contact information at https://forestry.ubc.ca/faculty-profile/isla-myers-smith/).
Apply
The applications will be received in 2024 until the position is filled. For more information on the application process see: https://teamshrub.com/team-shrub/opportunities/