15 Postdoctoral Fellowship at University of Leeds, West Yorkshire, England

We are seeking a specialist in machine learning to join our experienced team, to contribute to the improvement in storm predictions – nowcasting – for Africa. The NAIAR project – Nowcasting with Artificial Intelligence for African Rainfall – is conducting research to deliver new methods for storm prediction. Working with UK, African and international partner organisations, the results of your work will lead to nowcasting information that will benefit many people in Africa within minutes.

Are you an ambitious researcher looking for your next challenge? Do you have an established background in Membrane Protein Biochemistry? Do you want to further your career in one of the UKs leading research intensive Universities?

The bacterial outer membrane (OM) is perhaps the most striking example of membrane asymmetry in biology, with an inner leaflet dominated by phospholipids, and an outer leaflet dominated by lipopolysacccharide molecules that are highly negatively charged and variable in composition. The OM also has a high protein content and little lipid compared with typical biological membrane.  We are looking for an outstanding post-doctoral research fellow to join an MRC-funded team investigating the structure and function of the outer membrane proteins (OMPs) that have evolved to function in this fascinating, unique environment, that may be a rich source of new targets for antibacterial intervention.

A Research Fellow is required to work on a major project, funded by the IGD (Institute of Grocery Distribution) – a social impact organisation – to evaluate the impact of pilot trials to promote healthier and more sustainable diets in an in-store setting. The Research Fellow will analyse customer sales/loyalty card data in combination with the nutrition/health metrics and sustainability indicators. The programme works with the IGD and their 20 retailer and manufacturer working group members, who are implementing consumer behaviour change interventions. For more information about this project, please click here.

Are you an enthusiastic and talented early-career researcher with an interest in digital education and or medical education research? Do you have relevant experience in conducting or supporting research projects and undertaking research engagement activities? Do you want to further your career in one of the UK’s leading Universities and be part of a multidisciplinary team delivering real-world solutions?

Are you an ambitious researcher looking for your next challenge? Do you have a background addressing global challenges around One Health, food security and climate resilience? Do you want to further your career in one of the UK’s leading research-intensive Universities?

You will provide support to an exciting research project, which is being implemented across six West-African Countries. This European Commission-funded project focuses on developing One Health approaches to support agroecological transformations of peri-urban farming practices. It engages a 28-member consortium of partners across West Africa and Europe and brings together disciplinary perspectives from medicine, agriculture, social sciences, economics, and environmental sciences.

We are looking for a Research Fellow in AI and Biophysics to join our team, where we analyse big longitudinal datasets to describe the dynamic in complex systems. Funded by Kidney Research UK (KRUK), you will assist us in describing the transition between healthy and diseased states in Acute Kidney Injury (AKI) patients, using a longitudinal EHR dataset. We were 2022 KRUK MedTech competition winners and been awarded a KRUK Project Grant to conduct internal and external validation of an algorithm we developed, and to deliver a real-time study to provide evidence for NHS adoption. The post-holder will combine the advantages of the original optimal reaction coordinate framework and state-of-the-art machine learning approaches for the analysis of disease dynamics in the longitudinal datasets. 

We are looking to extend our team of the Leeds Index of Platform Labour Protest. The Leeds Index is a database compiling information about protest events of platform workers. We have developed a methodology that allows for  data of   platform worker contestations of their working conditions. Currently,  the Leeds Index looks at  four sectors (ride hailing, food delivery, parcel delivery and grocery delivery), and the aim is to extend this to other sectors, to increase the number of companies covered and to regularly update the dataset. We are looking for a new team member with a good understanding of the platform economy and a good knowledge of the academic debates in employment relations,  social movements and Protest Event Analysis. The successful candidate will need strong methodological skills, an eye for detail and well developed expertise in data coding, spreadsheets and statistical analysis (including experience of using SPSS, Stata and/ or R). Engagement with trade unions and policy-makers about the Leeds Index is a crucial element of the role.

We are seeking a talented field ecologist and ecological modeller with good knowledge of ornithology and excellent interpersonal and communication skills to join our team in evaluating the role of wild birds in the epizootiology of avian influenza in poultry. This will require coordination of sample collection by hunters from birds that they have shot around Great Britain in order to evaluate whether different strains of avian influenza virus can tracked over space and time. There will also be periodic surveys to measure bird community structure and bird behaviour across East Yorkshire. You will use the survey data to construct preliminary ecological network models of wild birds.

We are looking for an outstanding postdoctoral research fellow to join our interdisciplinary research team and work on ciliary proteins implicated in genetic disorders. Funded by the UK BBSRC, you will use integrative structural biology, high-speed atomic force microscopy and other cutting-edge biophysical techniques alongside cell biology methods to investigate the structures of these proteins and study their interactions with binding partners. This will provide a molecular-level understanding of how they contribute to cilium function and how mutations cause disease.  

The School of Earth and Environment (SEE) is seeking to appoint a research scientist in atmospheric modelling, who will focus on improving estimates of Australian emissions of the powerful greenhouse gas, methane. Collaborating with a range of partners within the UK and Australia, you will be working at the forefront of methane monitoring techniques, with access to state-of-the-art atmospheric models and new satellite-based observations. You will be part of a new collaboration between UK and Australian scientists as part of the EO4CH4 project and will contribute to improving estimates of agricultural emissions of methane, which are still poorly understood at a time when the Global Methane Pledge requires that anthropogenic emissions of methane must be reduced by 2030. You will investigate the complex relationships between agriculture-related emissions of different chemical species. Your research will contribute to the range of greenhouse gas-related monitoring work which will inform future climate-based policy decisions.

iDEM aims at addressing the barriers in deliberative and participatory democratic practices by using natural language processing methods as enablers in addressing political inequality for deliberation and participation in democratic spaces. In collaboration with other EU partners, we will develop techniques to detect difficult words and constructions in the texts of the target domain and for the target audiences by means of fine-tuning large language models. The research objective for this task is aimed at addressing the following problems: (i) the need to transfer prediction models across different user groups and domains, often with  small amounts of training data; (ii) the need to deal with multiple languages; and (iii) the need to combine heterogeneous levels of annotation on the levels of words, passages, sentences or texts, often with noise and inconsistent annotations. We will also focus on experimenting with explainable AI, so that the classifiers can provide explanations to ensure that the right choices are made for the right reasons.

Are you an ambitious researcher looking for your next challenge? Do you have a background in the carbonate geochemistry of foraminifera and the development of environmental proxies? Do you want to further your career in one of the UK’s leading research intensive Universities?
You will join a team of geochemists and palaeontologists lead by Dr Rob Newton as part of the new Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) ‘New foraminiferal proxies for Cenozoic seawater geochemistry’ (ForSea) project. This project aims to develop two new inter-related proxies based on the chemistry of foraminiferal calcite for the carbonate and sulfate ions in seawater and apply them to the Cenozoic.

Are you an ambitious researcher looking for your next challenge? Do you have a background in textile/fashion technology with ideally CAD technology experience? Do you want to further your career in one of the UK’s leading research-intensive Universities?

This industry supported project “Textile Characterisation and Laundering Technology” aims to establish improved understanding of the laundering process and the effects on the fabric/garment appearance. The ground-breaking approach will link textile materials insight with CAD characterisation. You will work within a multi-disciplinary team of experts to carry out research about textile laundering and fabric/garment characterisation and will be actively involved in research, potentially producing high quality publications and contributing to the School’s Research Excellence Framework (REF).