05 Postdoctoral Fellowship at Durham University, England

A globally outstanding centre of teaching and research excellence, a warm and friendly place to work, a unique and historic setting – Durham is a university like no other.

As one of the UK’s leading universities, Durham is an incredible place to define your career. The University is located within a beautiful historic city, home to a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and surrounded by stunning countryside. Our talented scholars and researchers from around the world are tackling global issues and making a difference to people’s lives.  

We believe that inspiring our people to do outstanding things at Durham enables Durham people to do outstanding things in the world. Being a part of Durham is about more than just the success of the University, it’s also about contributing to the success of the city, county and community.

A Postdoctoral Research Associate position in conversational analysis is available, full-time, for a period of 15 months within the Department of Sport and Exercise Sciences. The post provides an exciting opportunity to make a major contribution to join the £1million+ funded ‘Moving Social Work’ project as part of specific work packages called ‘Physical Activity Social Work Champions’ and ‘Multiple-agency Physical Activity Promotion’. Working in partnership with Disability Rights UK, Moving Social Work is a co-produced programme of research that aims to embed physical activity advocacy with and for disabled people into the education, training, and routine practice of social work. We are seeking creative, high-quality researchers with a background in sport and exercise sciences, social work, health psychology, sociology, critical disability studies and/or other relevant disciplines/areas that can strike a balance between research, practice, and knowledge translation skills. The successful applicant will create, evaluate, and implement a social work physical activity advocates programme and multiagency/interprofessional approach to physical activity promotion. This work has three core aims: to create and test training for social workers to train social work students and professionals in advocating physical activity to and with disabled people; to produce and evaluate research that identifies how social care and health professionals can effectively work with each other to coordinate and promote physical activity; with the research manager, to build and support a network of trained social work physical activity champions to maintain quality training, multiagency/interprofessional working, and the uptake of training. The successful applicant will be expected to co-ordinate day to day research activity including study set-up, recruitment of champions, mixed methods data collection, qualitative and quantitative analysis, creation of resources and toolkits, write up of findings, drafting of progress reports, and knowledge translation activities. They will work closely with the Moving Social Work team to support co-production, enable transdisciplinary work to flourish, and ensure findings are integrated into the research programme and implemented in practice. The position will provide the opportunity to develop one’s career by, for example, enhancing leadership and management skills, learning about and implementing new research methods, leading and contributing to research outputs, and learning more about and delivering impactful research in collaboration with different partners and the research team.  

A Postdoctoral Research Associate position in physical activity is available, full-time, for a period of 2 years within the Department of Sport and Exercise Sciences. The post provides an exciting opportunity to make a major contribution to join the £1million+ funded ‘Moving Social Work’ project as part of specific work packages called ‘Physical Activity Social Work Champions’ and ‘Multiple-agency Physical Activity Promotion’. Working in partnership with Disability Rights UK, Moving Social Work is a co-produced programme of research that aims to embed physical activity advocacy with and for disabled people into the education, training, and routine practice of social work. We are seeking creative, high-quality researchers with a background in sport and exercise sciences, social work, health psychology, sociology, critical disability studies and/or other relevant disciplines/areas that can strike a balance between research, practice, and knowledge translation skills. The successful applicant will create, evaluate, and implement a social work physical activity advocates programme and multiagency/interprofessional approach to physical activity promotion. This work has three core aims: to create and test training for social workers to train social work students and professionals in advocating physical activity to and with disabled people; to produce and evaluate research that identifies how social care and health professionals can effectively work with each other to coordinate and promote physical activity; with the research manager, to build and support a network of trained social work physical activity champions to maintain quality training, multiagency/interprofessional working, and the uptake of training. The successful applicant will be expected to co-ordinate day to day research activity including study set-up, recruitment of champions, mixed methods data collection, qualitative and quantitative analysis, creation of resources and toolkits, write up of findings, drafting of progress reports, and knowledge translation activities. They will work closely with the Moving Social Work team to support co-production, enable transdisciplinary work to flourish, and ensure findings are integrated into the research programme and implemented in practice. The position will provide the opportunity to develop one’s career by, for example, enhancing leadership and management skills, learning about and implementing new research methods, leading and contributing to research outputs, and learning more about and delivering impactful research in collaboration with different partners and the research team.  

The role includes work on two research projects where Durham University is a partner to research funded by the Norwegian Research Council. The projects are led by colleagues at the university of Oslo (‘Include’) and the Fridtjof Nansen Institute (‘Powerpoor’) and managed at Durham University by Professor Simone Abram.

The Include Research Centre for Socially Inclusive Energy Transitions (Include) is a research centre that produces knowledge about how to realise a socially just low-carbon society through socially inclusive processes and in close collaboration between researchers and partners in the public, private and voluntary sectors. Include is hosted by the Centre for Development and the Environment (SUM) at the University of Oslo (UiO). Include has six research partners – five in in Norway and Durham University in the UK – and 23 additional partners in Norway. (see https://www.sum.uio.no/english/include/about/)

PowerPoor is the first research project to systematically investigate energy poverty (EP) in the Norwegian context in comparison with the UK and other countries, with EP linked to the energy transition. The project addresses an issue that recently entered the Norwegian agenda, but which is in dire need of sound research for evidence-based knowledge and solutions. The four-year project is led by Dr. Tor Håkon Jackson Inderberg and the Fridtjof Nansen Institute, the leading research institute on climate and energy management in Europe.

Applications are invited for a Research Associate or Postdoctoral Research Associate to join our core software development team led by Prof Tobias Weinzierl. We particularly want to encourage candidates with a first degree (BSc or MSc) in sciences who consider staying in academia yet have a liking for software development, or PhDs who found themselves enjoying software development more than other aspects of academic live throughout their studies. Flexible working arrangements are available.

In close collaboration with the PI, the applicant will identify tasks and software components that are mission-critical for the underlying research (such as components which consume too much compute time and need to be ported to GPUs, third-party components that should be coupled, improved postprocessing scripts, or support for novel input file formats for new experiments) and implement these software blocks independently. The applicant will be embedded into a team of researchers, all contributing multiple software building blocks to the overall compute ecosystem. The delivered software will directly be used by collaboration partners – primarily in their earthquake and gravitational wave simulation codes.