10 Postdoctoral Fellowship at Umea University, Sweden 

Várdduo – Centre for Sámi research is a unit at Umeå University that coordinates and initiates research in and about Sápmi, with a focus on Sámi and other Indigenous cultures,  societies, histories and languages. It is a meeting place for researchers and PhD students from various disciplines, with research interests connected to Sámi or other Indigenous issues. Várdduo provides an inspiring research environment and constitutes a valuable platform for creative exchanges that enriches research. As a unique competence center for Sámi research in Sweden, research communication is a central part of Várdduo’s work. Read more about Várdduo at: https://www.umu.se/vardduo-centrum-for-samisk-forskning/ .

At Várdduo research is currently carried out in areas such as history, land rights and conflicts, natural resource exploitation, education and health. However, we welcome projects with other research directions.

The Project is a collaboration between Assistant Professor Manuel Menke (Copenhagen University – PI), Associate Professor Karoline Andrea Ihlebæk (Olso Metropolitan University), Assistant Professor Katarina Pettersson (University of Helsinki), and Associate Professor Samuel Merrill (Umeå University). It will study the use of the past in the digital campaign material and social media content of political parties in Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland during the build-up to these countries’ most recent past elections. Its focus concerns which pasts Nordic political parties refer to in their communication, how they embed the past in visions of the future, and how they strategically employ the past to create a sense of collective identity and shared interest to connect with potential voters.

The advertised position relates primarily to the Sweden and Finland cases and will be supervised by Samuel Merrill at Umeå University’s Department of Sociology and Centre for Digital Social Research (DIGSUM) with the remote support of Katarina Pettersson (University of Helsinki). During the project a second post-doctoral fellow, with whom the recruited individual will also work, will be based at Copenhagen University (focusing primarily on the Danish and Norwegian cases).

The rapid development of autonomous systems, connected devices, and distributed applications poses several challenges in dealing with petabytes of data in diverse resource-constrained environments. Federated machine learning (FML) is a collaborative learning solution to handle these problems without sharing data with centralised servers. However, several emerging threats target FML training, learning, and inference to fail or mislead models at early learning rounds, particularly backdoor and bitflip attack and defence strategies under-explored in FML. These results jeopardize achieving trustworthy performance for any downstream tasks. Therefore, this project envisions developing and validating attack and defence strategies in federated learning for limited and diverse non-iid (independent identically distributed) data under non-standard and adversarial settings, which are ideally suited for edge AI infrastructures. These goals can be achieved by inducing unique features in federated learning algorithms such as robust training, model restoration, trustworthy device selection, secure learning and inference, fault-tolerance against failures and attacks, as well as resilient, fair and robust models. The ambition is to validate them in classical non-standard settings and apply them to solutions for constraint environments (e.g., the Internet of Things (IoT) and robotic arms). Potentially, teaching up to a maximum of 20% can be included in the work tasks.

Pollination is a key ecosystem service upkeeping plant diversity as well as crops of cultivated plants. How the organisms interact and what impacts the interactions of pollination systems, is yet a study field filled with knowledge gaps.

The research aims to fill in the gaps by assessing how the ecological communities of pollinators, plants and microbes are structured and how they function, in regard to plant usage and microbe sharing, in different environments, and in the presence and in the absence of managed pollinators. We use cutting-edge molecular tools, namely DNA metabarcoding and metagenomics to identify the interacting taxa. We study pollination communities primarily in the Boreal zone, but also in the Arctic.

The planned work consists of collecting samples in the field, identifying the target organisms by DNA metabarcoding, analyzing data on pollinator and microbial communities as well as writing research articles to identify how pollinator communities change due to different factors. The selected candidate is expected to take part in designing their project and take responsibility for its implementation from data collection to presentation of results in both scientific journals and conferences. Opportunities for professional development, as an example in project management, leadership, mentoring, supervision, teaching and grant writing, are available and encouraged. The position offers a possibility to contribute to the design and research questions of the study.

The position is advertised within the framework of the Horizon Europe IDAlert project (idalertproject.eu), which seeks to understand the impact of climate change and adaptation responses on the emergence infectious diseases in Europe. An integral part of the project is to develop advanced decision support tools through data-driven epidemiological modelling allowing for projections and scenario assessments.

The research work will be conducted within the N4 Research Group (www.n4researchgroup.se; https://www.umu.se/en/research/groups/n4-research-group/); a very active research group with funding from e.g. The Swedish Research Council, FORTE and ALF.

We conduct several randomized clinical intervention studies. We have unique and large cohorts of very premature infants and we also run the large population study NorthPop (see www.northpop.se) where we collect extensive, longitudinal data from 10,000 families (parents and children).

The initial focus of this postdoctoral project will be studies of children born very prematurely with the aim of finding biomarkers and factors that can influence later health in these high-risk children.

The connection between optimization and machine learning is at the heart of many recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and autonomous systems. Many machine learning applications are modeled as optimization problems, and as problems become more and more complex, new optimization methods are needed. Within this framework, the successful candidate is encouraged to develop their research agenda in close collaboration with their supervisor.

The research is financed and carried out within the framework of the Bio4energy program (www.bio4energy.se). Bio4energy is an interdisciplinary program with an overall focus on the value chain from forest, residual products and waste to energy, chemicals and material extraction. The research conducted within the framework of this position is based on a systems perspective with a particular focus on economics, markets and industry development. As a post-doctoral researcher, you will be part of a team of senior researchers in Economics. Your workplace is the Economics department at USBE, and you will also be part of the CERE (www.cere.se) research environment with a network of research fellows. 

The Swedish energy market has undergone, and is expected to undergo, major changes with increased competition, increasing energy prices and large fluctuations in relative prices between different energy types. An important question in this context is how the Swedish industry’s energy use and choice between different types of energy has been affected, and possibly will be affected in the future, by this transition. Based on detailed data from Statistics Sweden which includes, among other things, energy consumption at firm level for over 30 different types of energy sources, analyses of how the Swedish industry has changed its energy use can be carried out. Potential research questions may also relate to regional heterogeneity in demand for bioenergy, and the degree of competition for bioenergy. With greater knowledge of the above-mentioned factors, this research also intends to touch upon possible effects of policy instruments and regulations related to bioenergy and the Swedish industry.

For many years, successful research on prostate cancer has been ongoing at Umeå University. As a postdoctoral researcher, you will be part of a research group investigating molecular biological explanations for the development of prostate cancer and exploring how these can be used as biomarkers and treatment targets for the disease. More information about the research group and its activities can be found here: https://www.umu.se/en/research/groups/biomarkers-for-aggressive-prostatecancer/. The specific postdoctoral project aims to elucidate interactions between genetic and epigenetic changes in the emergence of bone metastases in prostate cancer and, based on these findings, identify and evaluate new treatment possibilities. The research will involve handling and analyzing biobank samples, bioinformatics analysis of large-scale data matrices, and evaluating potential treatment strategies in experimental model systems for prostate cancer.