14 Postdoctoral Fellowship at Stockholm University, Sweden

This recruitment is connected to the Wallenberg Initiative Material Science for Sustainability (WISE). WISE, funded by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, is the largest-ever investment in materials science in Sweden and will encompass major efforts at Sweden’s foremost universities over the course of 10 years. The vision is a sustainable future through material science. Read more: wise-materials.org.

The purpose of this project is to develop textile waste-based foams with superinsulating properties (i.e. a thermal conductivity below the value for air) and specific strength in the wet state that is superior or on par to fossil-based insulating materials. The postdoctoral fellow is expected to identify and upcycle fibrillar starting materials from textile waste, develop scalable and environmentally benign processing and cross-linking routes to produce super-insulating and moisture resilient foams, and characterise the structure of the foams with a combination of e.g. SEM, AFM, and SAXS/WAXS. The postdoctoral fellow will also be responsible to characterise the relative humidity-dependent mechanical properties and thermal conductivity with e.g. Hotdisk thermal analyzer and Instron universal testing machine.

Postdoctoral position for immediate appointment to work with Dr. Sergey Koroidov and Prof. Anders Nilsson and study the mechanism of CO2 reduction reaction (CO2RR) under actual experimental conditions using X-ray and laser spectroscopies. The candidate will combine operando tools with transient techniques to observe intermediates and identify redox changes in catalyst composition and species formed on its surface in response to an external stimulus. This project aims to deliver knowledge that leads to a sustainable CO2RR to obtain higher hydrocarbons and alcohols as an unrivaled energy resource in energy density, storage, and distribution.

Assessing the role of ice-dammed lakes in driving ice sheet demise. The impounding of proglacial lakes between a retreating ice front and surrounding ice-free land fundamentally changes the modes and rates of mass loss from an ice sheet. New reconstructions, being carried out by the project team at Stockholm University, show that large tracts of the late-stage Fennoscandian Ice Sheet terminated in ice-dammed lakes, varying from small alpine lakes, to 100-km scale lake complexes, to the 1000-km calving front of the Baltic Ice Lake. Today, the Greenland Ice Sheet sheds large volumes of surface water into ice-marginal lakes, and future Greenland projections suggest a similar scenario to that of the Fennoscandian Ice Sheet will develop.

The position will be associated with the project “Persistent organic chemicals in high-altitude atmosphere and ecosystems” financed by the Swedish Research Council FORMAS. Persistent organic chemicals (POCs) were recently found also at high altitude at the world’s highest atmospheric observatory (5240 masl), the Chacaltaya GAW station (CHC) in Bolivia. This project examines the hypothesis that the free troposphere is a critical long-range transport medium and leads to increasing POC contamination and subsequent risk to humans and ecosystems at high altitudes. The project aims to understand FT-mediated pollutant transport and potential sources, through close collaboration with atmospheric, meteorological, geological, and environmental scientists from European and South American institutes.

The project involves the development of new heterogeneous metal catalysts for organic synthesis where different forms of porous materials are employed as carriers for metals. The new metal catalysts will be studied for obtaining different organic transformations. The project is divided in two parts. In one part, studies will be made for the immobilization of metal catalysts to  microcrystalline cellulose (MCC) or mesocellular foam (MCF), and in another part these catalysts will be explored in selective organic reactions. Examples on reaction to be studied are metal-catalyzed oxidative carbocyclizations, metal-catalyzed reactions of propargylic derivatives, and cascade reactions catalyzed by metalloenzymatic hybrids.

We seek to appoint a postdoctoral fellow with expertise in high-resolution mass spectrometry analysis. The position will be associated with an EU-funded research project (RE-MEND) that will pursue an interdisciplinary path towards better strategies to protect vulnerable individuals from mental illness. Comprehensive nontargeted mass spectrometry based adductomics, and other –omics in collaboration, will be applied on selected samples from large cohorts to improve the molecular and environmental understanding of mental illness, and to discover new biomarkers that can contribute in predicting susceptibility and resilience.

The postdoctoral position is connected to the Swedish MATS satellite mission (Mesospheric Airglow/Aerosol Tomography and Spectroscopy). The MATS satellite was launched in November 2022 to investigate atmospheric waves with a focus on the Earth’s mesosphere and lower thermosphere. The remote sensing performed by MATS is based on optical imaging of atmospheric emissions and tomographic/spectroscopic analysis of the resulting data.

The project is a collaboration between the department of Mathematics at Stockholm University and FLOW, KTH, in the Department of Engineering Mechanics.  FLOW is a continuation of the Linné FLOW Centre at KTH started in January 2007 and is one of 20 original centres of excellence set up by the Swedish Research Council (VR), as the result of a highly competitive process with international evaluation. The role of FLOW is to bring together and coordinate the fundamental fluid dynamics research performed by the partners. The position is funded by SeRC (Swedish e-Science Research Centre), an environment within the strategic research area (SRA) of e-Science by the Swedish government Strategic Research Area Initiative. The mission statement of SeRC is to develop state-of-the-art e-Science tools and provide e-infrastructure support to existing and emerging e-Science communities to achieve scientific breakthroughs in Sweden.

The project studies the dynamical and thermodynamical properties of non-equilibrium systems on the micro-scale. Of central interest are Brownian heat engines which use micrometer-sized particles (active or passive) as “working medium” to extract heat from the surrounding thermal bath and turn it into useful work. In addition to their fundamental relevance, the project results will improve our understanding of man-made micro- and nano-machines and of biological energy conversion processes on the cellular and sub-cellular level.

The position is associated with the EFRA project on food saftey with the main goal to deliver the first analytics-enabled, secure-by-design, green data space for AI-enabled food risk prevention. To this end it will utilize NLP, machine learning and explainable methods for knowledge discovery from heterogeneous data sources (including multilingual data). The intention is to build a novel data management and analytics framework, based on three pillars: (1) Data hub – searchable data integration of heterogeneous data, (2) Analytic tools – used together with the data hub to distill and combine useful insights regarding food safety from available data, and (3) Data and Analytics marketplace – a single resource for stakeholders in food safety to interact with both data and predictions methods for food safety. The final product will be a set of methods and tools for integrating massive and heterogeneous food safety related data sources, a set of predictive models for learning from these data sources, with emphasis on interpretability and explainability of the models’ rationale for the predictions. A large extent of the data utilized in this project will be in a textual format, hence expertise in the field of NLP is needed for this position. 

This recruitment is connected to the Wallenberg Initiative Materials Science for Sustainability (WISE), wise-materials.org. WISE, funded by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, is the largest-ever investment in materials science in Sweden and will encompass major efforts at Sweden’s foremost universities over the course of 10 years. The vision is a sustainable future through materials science. Read more: https://wise-materials.org.