05 Postdoctoral Fellowship at Umea University, Sweden

The postdoc position is supported by a wider project, which is monitoring ecosystem functioning in tropical montane cloud forests (TMCF). The core study site is in a Peruvian TMCF, where several large-scale experiments have been ongoing since 2017 to monitor the effects of decreased water inputs to the system. In addition, the project has maintained a nearby long-term monitoring site in a pristine TMCF forest since 2007. At all of these sites, most ecosystem carbon fluxes of the canopy, stems, soil and roots have been regularly monitored, generating detailed carbon cycle time series for ~5 years from the experiments and ~18 years from the long-term monitoring site. These data are complemented by past and ongoing collections of plant ecophysiology and soil biochemistry.

The goal of the project is to determine the genetic basis of treatment resistance in ovarian carcinoma. Ovarian carcinoma is one of the most lethal cancers; approximately half of patients die within five years after diagnosis. To address this challenge, we established an NSG mouse model that included human ovarian carcinoma xenografts and a chemotherapy treatment regimen mimicking the human situation. In your project, you will perform a CRISPR screen in this in vivo model. Thereafter, based on the results of the screen, novel therapeutic treatment strategies and possible new biomarkers will be explored. The overall aim is to develop new therapeutic strategies that efficiently target currently hard-to-treat ovarian carcinomas.

How plants will respond to increasing CO2 and climatic change is a large uncertainty for ecosystems, crop productivity and climate predictions. To tackle this uncertainty, we combine: growth chamber experiments, samples from world-unique CO2 experiments, cutting-edge NMR spectroscopy and isotopomer analysis (doi 10.1111/nph.20358). Two postdocs will work together to conduct plant ecophysiology experiments, and to analyze samples by NMR spectroscopy.

This postdoc with focus on NMR spectroscopy will conduct chemistry labwork to prepare samples for NMR, run NMR expermiments – in particular for quantification of isotopomers, interpret isotopomer abundances in terms of shifts in plant carbon metabolism, and prepare results for presentation at conferences and publication. 

Linear algebra expressions are evaluated in an efficient and robust way by mapping them to a carefully chosen sequence of calls to optimized functions as offered by libraries such as BLAS and LAPACK. The mapping is by no means unique, and different mappings differ in terms of time, space, and accuracy. When the sizes of the matrices are unknown at compile-time, as is often the case, then the problem is further complicated by the fact that no single mapping is optimal for all combinations of matrix sizes. As a consequence, any code generated (at compile-time) to evaluate the at run-time) must consist of more than just a single sequence of function calls.