Meta-omic Approaches to Understanding and Predicting Soil Biodiversity Ecosystem Function Relationships

The James Hutton Institute in Aberdeen, Scotland and the department of Algorithmic Bioinformatics in Düsseldorf, Germany are looking for a talented and motivated individual to pursue a PhD project in computational biology. This project will be one of the first to bridge the gap between microbial ecology and computational biology. The project will investigate microbial genomes for evolutionary fitness and ecological adaptation. The aim will be to predict ecological niches from genome content with special focus of the impact of lateral gene transfer. The work will require to design and apply simple mathematical models to predict competitive fitness and to develop and apply tools for extensive data-mining and gene-prediction on microbial genomes from public domain databases and to discover events and mechanisms of lateral gene transfer. The work will be interdisciplinary, integrating topics from microbial ecology, genetics, evolutionary theory and bioinformatics.
The student will take part in the University of Aberdeen’s graduate programme and its new bioinformatics training programme. It is also expected from the student to spend periods of time in Germany to participate in bioinformatics training at the Department of Algorithmic Bioinformatics at Heinrich-Heine-University in Düsseldorf.

Requirements are a degree in microbial ecology, evolutionary theory, bioinformatics, computer science, statistics or related field. The candidate must have a strong interest in interdisciplinary collaborations and good programming skills. Background knowledge in population genetics and genomics is highly advantageous.

Location: The James Hutton Institute in Aberdeen, Scotland is one of the leading land research institutes in the world, bringing together expertise in crop research, soils and land-use. It provides a dynamic interdisciplinary research environment addressing important questions on key global issues, such as food and energy security, biodiversity, and climate change. The department of Algorithmic Bioinformatics in Düsseldorf is part of the newly established excellence cluster and collaborates locally, nationally and internationally with biologists and medical experts from universities and research institutes worldwide. We focus on computational metagenomics, studies of viral evolution and have started collaborations in cancer genomics.