Postdoctoral Fellowship (06) at Umea University, Sweden

We are seeking a candidate for a 3-year postdoc position to be included in the research initiative “Learning and Brain Plasticity throughout the lifespan”, which is one of Umeå University’s prioritized research areas. This project spans a multidisciplinary network of 20 principal investigators across three faculties with Professor Lars Nyberg as the project leader. The postdoc will be based within the Department of Computing Science and work closely with both the Department of Statistics at USBE and Umeå Center for Functional Brain Imaging (UFBI). The research will also connect with other sub projects in the research initiative. 

Interventions to promote lifelong learning show promising results but are hampered by large individual differences in response. It is evident that we need to rethink the premises of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to better predict who will benefit from which intervention. As a first step in this process we sought to utilize existing prospective cohort studies and intervention data to predict individual factors conducive to lifelong learning trajectories. Examples of such data come from the Betula study, the Västerbotten Intervention Programme (VIP), exercise and cognitive training interventions, and rehabilitation studies.

Chlamydia trachomatis (Ct) is a leading cause of urogenital and ocular infections worldwide. Its success as a pathogen hinges on its highly specialized developmental cycle and its obligate intracellular lifestyle that depends on precise modulation of host cell pathways. A key knowledge gap concerns how Ct protects its intracellular niche from xenophagy, a major cell‑autonomous defense mechanism that targets intracellular pathogens for degradation.

This project aims to uncover the molecular strategies Ct uses to evade xenophagic responses. Building on a strong set of unpublished findings from our laboratory, the postdoc will investigate the bacterial effectors and host factors involved, dissect their mechanisms of action, and determine how this interplay shapes infection outcomes. Ultimately, the insights gained are expected to lay the groundwork for innovative therapeutic approaches that enhance host defense pathways to control or eliminate Ct infection.

The postdoc position is supported by the Water4All Transnational Project: Impacts of climate, N and P deposition and land use on water as a driver of the greenhouse gases regulatory ecosystem service in headwater catchments (SERVICO2). We aim to answer two major research questions: 1) Are headwater catchments currently acting as sinks or sources of CO2 and other greenhouse gases? 2) Is this status changing with global change, and if so, in what direction? In the project we will develop low-cost sensors to obtain high-resolution measurements of greenhouse gases in both time and space. We will then use these and other methods to determine the carbon balance in a network of headwater catchments across Europe (boreal and Arctic Northern Europe to mountains in Central and Southern Europe), covering climatic and N-P deposition gradients. The project consists of an interdisciplinary consortium, with a core of hydro(geo)logists and biogeochemists, with complementary expertise in the use and development of low-cost sensors, hydrological and biogeochemical models, and stable isotopes. The consortium’s complementary expertise enables us to work at the catchment scale, with experts on soil, vegetation, groundwater, stream/rivers, lakes, and the connection to the atmosphere. This specific postdoc position will focus on assessment of carbon processing and fluxes in Arctic headwaters. It will include field studies and the use of existing data, potentially complemented with modelling. The postdoc is also expected to collaborate with project partners and carry out comparative studies of carbon dynamics across sites.  

This project builds conceptually on our earlier work on community and ecosystem processes across elevational gradients in mountains (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature21027). Following from that work, and to better understand the mechanisms involved, about a decade ago we (together with a dedicated group of international collaborators) have set up a globally distributed experiment on mountains around the world (i.e., the WaRM experiment: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ece3.9396), eight sites of which are still ongoing, in Swtizerland, France, Greenland, China, the USA, Canada, New Zealand and Argentina. In brief, at each of these locations the experiment consists of a full factorial design of three factors: elevation (high or low) × experimental warming (i.e., with or without open-top chambers) × manipulation of dominant plant species (removed or not removed). These treatments have been maintained throughout the course of the experiment and are still ongoing.

The postdoctoral researcher will, in collaboration with the project leads and local collaborators, decide on a series of measurements to be performed across the WaRM experimental plots in the eight countries. These measurements should aim to best inform on how community and ecosystem properties, and aboveground-belowground linkages, are impacted by the three factors and their interactions, and whether or not these impacts operate in similar or different ways in mountains around the world. The postdoctoral researcher will coordinate these measurements and necessary samplings across the eight sites, and travel to the majority of them to guide these activities. They will also lead the analysis of the resulting data and the writing of manuscripts targeted at major journals. The research will be generously funded through a 5-year grant from the Wallenberg Scholars award scheme.

This postdoctoral position is funded through a Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) project investigating how major volcanic eruptions and their atmospheric consequences have shaped large-scale historical epidemic events. These include transformative pandemics such as the Plague of Justinian (6th–8th century), the Black Death (14th century), and later plague waves across Europe and Asia.

The project adopts a strongly interdisciplinary and systems-oriented research approach, integrating expertise from applied mathematics, ecology, environmental science, history, climate science, and infectious disease epidemiology. By combining historical datasets, environmental reconstructions, and mechanistic modelling, the project seeks to advance fundamental understanding of how complex environmental perturbations influence infectious disease emergence, spread, and persistence across coupled human–environment systems.

A central component of the project is the development of next-generation process-based eco-epidemiological models that explicitly integrate environmental variability, ecological interactions, and human mobility networks. The project is conducted in close collaboration between Umeå University and Lund University, with opportunities for an international research stay at Heidelberg University, Germany, providing access to a broad interdisciplinary research network.

With the aim to better understand the interaction between gut microbiota and host, this research project aims to characterize how specific dietary supplements can affect the composition of the gut microbiota and the function of the intestinal mucus layer.

The project will be carried out in the Schröder lab, located in the Department of Molecular Biology, which is part of the Laboratory of Molecular Infection Medicine Sweden (MIMS) and Umeå Centre for Microbial Research (UCMR). The position will include a variety of molecular biology approaches, anaerobic bacterial culturing, ex vivo and in vivo experiments as well as state-of-the-art mucus measurements and imaging techniques.

The specific work responsibilities of the postdoctoral researcher include:

·         Test how specific dietary supplements affect mucus penetrability in viable tissue.

·         Test how specific dietary supplements affect mucus growth rate in viable tissue.

·         Collect and analyse tissue and stool samples from in vivo experiments.

·         Culture anaerobic gut bacteria under various conditions by using an anaerobic chamber

·         Use enzymatic approaches to investigate specific microbial mucus degradation capacity in vitro

·         Perform computational analyses to investigate gut microbiota composition