Assoc Prof Kim Handley, Dr Gavin Lear, Prof SF Thrush
No more applications being accepted
About the Project
Microorganisms play an important role in cycling nutrients and in maintaining healthy conditions in aqueous environments, yet they are sensitive to anthropogenic activities. The aim of the project is to improve our understanding of how microbial communities respond to estuarine nutrient pollution, including algal overgrowth. Estuaries are complex, naturally perturbed, ecosystems and important buffer zones between land and sea. They represent the endpoint of land watershed drainage, and are subject to cumulative waterborne contaminants. As such, they are prone to anthropogenic nutrient overloading, which can lead to eutrophication, anoxic conditions and toxic sulfide production. The student will use community genomics and transcriptomics to study the impact of nutrients, algae and related disturbances on microbial functioning in estuaries.
The student will receive training in powerful omic techniques, which enable us to recover the lifestyles and metabolisms of organisms within complex microbial communities in situ, while avoiding the pitfalls of microbial cultivation bias and the inaccessibility of many environmentally relevant organisms to laboratory isolation methods.
Funding Notes
The PhD student will be supported by a Royal Society of New Zealand Rutherford Discovery Fellowship grant, covering research costs, student fees, a tax free stipend of $25K (NZD) per year and health insurance. Both international and domestic students are eligible.
Applicants need a degree with a research component (e.g. Masters or BSc Honours); an excellent academic record; and a keen interest 'and' background in microbiology, computational biology and/or genomics. Applicants should email Dr Kim Handley their CV, academic transcripts, a statement of research interests, and contact details for at least two referees. Incomplete applications are unlikely to be considered.
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