07 Postdoctoral Fellowship at Utrecht University, Netherlands

The COOPERATION project will recapture the lost archives and historical knowledge of international public health cooperation between the ‘global north’ and the ‘global south’ by analysing its first and longest-lasting instances: the sanitary councils in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Established in Tangier, Alexandria, Tunis, Istanbul and Tehran, these unprecedented institutions strategised against waves of epidemics and pandemics between the 1790s and the 1940s. Their European, American and native co-founders invented new models for fighting pandemics from below and stopping the diseases in their tracks. They continually strove to overcome the familiar barriers to cooperation posed by inter-imperial competition in a multipolar world, economic inequities, protests against quarantine restrictions and racial and Orientalist biases, among others. COOPERATION project will write an entangled history of health cooperation, by shifting the focus from top-down to bottom-up processes. Consulting archival sources in Europe, MENA, and North America, it will determine the historical preconditions for effective international public health cooperation.

Sanctuaries were the venues par excellence where innovative ideas about human interactions and identities were publicly advertised and anchored in the sacred environment. The neutral space provided by the temenē of the gods was a fertile ground for communication between various groups both within and beyond Athens. They were authoritative centres where appropriate behaviour was both displayed and enacted. As nodes within a wider local, regional, or international network, Athenian sanctuaries were eminently suitable for a variety of coded messaging with regard to social status, political intent, and intercultural exchange. Such statements were incessantly anchored in “sacrality”, sacred narratives and notions that could be expressed through a wide variety of media, i.e., inscriptions, architecture, dedications, ritual acts, and feasting practices. Normative adjustments were constantly expressed in sacral terms in order to give them transformative societal force. In turn, sacrality informed the design, organisation and iconography of sacred monuments and buildings, the objects stored within them, as well as the inscriptions that were written on them.

We have recently received funding to leverage advances in pan-genomics and deep-learning to build predictive models to help understand why certain microbial variants are successful pathogens and what emerging variants to prioritise.

The focus of this research is to be applied to the realms of pandemic preparedness and antimicrobial resistance. Specifically, we aim to build genomic driven classifiers that can identify what genomic changes are predictive for pandemic spread in terms of both the micro-organism and their resistance cargo. There is a critical need to better predict the differential risk that different strain types pose such that proportional interventions that maximise public safety and minimise economic losses are developed.

Ecosystems are highly nonlinear systems characterised by a multiplicity of stable states, but seldom have the time to converge to these states. Their dynamics are rather affected by unpredictable natural drivers and human intervention to meet various functional needs. Multistability in variable environments is of deep concern because of the possible occurrence of state transitions involving abrupt declines in ecosystem function as tipping points are traversed, or gradual declines by front propagation. For the ERC-Synergy project Pathways of resilience and evasion of tipping in ecosystems (RESILIENCE), we offer a postdoc position at Ben-Gurion University to study the dynamics of fronts and the possible roles of front instabilities in reversing degradation processes, such as desertification and species invasion in resource-limited ecosystems.

There is an urgent need to understand the effects that global change can have on the Earth, its system components and ecosystems. One area of critical concern is the imminent abrupt and irreversible critical transitions of ecosystems through tipping points. Recent discoveries indicate that such tipping could be evaded and even reversed in ecosystems through spatial pattern formation, thereby creating pathways of resilience.

The aim of RESILIENCE is to fundamentally advance our understanding and predictions of tipping points and critical transitions in ecosystems and reveal how these can be evaded and even reversed through spatial pattern formation. RESILIENCE will develop a new theory for emerging resilience through spatial pattern formation and link this with real tipping-prone biomes undergoing accelerating global change: savanna and tundra. The candidate will benefit from the expertise of the four Principal Investigators (PIs) in the RESILIENCE project: Max Rietkerk , an ecologist at Utrecht University, Arjen Doelman, a mathematician at Leiden University, Ehud Meron, a physicist at Ben-Gurion University, and Isla Myers-Smith, an ecologist at the University of British Columbia.

In this postdoc project at the University of British Columbia, you will study spatial patterns in tundra ecosystems, revealing how spatial patterns relate to ecosystem resilience across the tundra biome. For this project, you will quantify the extent of different spatial patterning within tundra ecosystems using a combination of satellite images, aerial photographs, drone imagery and in-situ data from focal tundra research sites and regions around the circumpolar Arctic including at the tree line. You will then compare regions with greater or lesser spatial patterning to global change drivers and environmental properties and link spatial patterns to landscape and ecological change. This research will test the hypothesis that certain spatial patterning can confer resilience to ecological change using approaches previously applied in savanna and dryland ecosystems. This will increase our understanding of tundra ecosystem resilience and will be used to predict rates of landscape and ecological change with global change across the tundra biome. We collaborate with PhD candidates, other postdocs and senior researchers from the different involved universities to explore mathematical and physical models of the resulting data to address the larger project goals.