Job Offers

Pro­ject Staff Mem­ber (Postdoc­toral Re­searcher pos­i­tion for Geo­grapher/Geo-In­form­at­ics)

The In­sti­tute for Eco­lo­gical Eco­nom­ics is cur­rently in­vit­ing ap­plic­a­tions for a 30-40 hours/week Pro­ject Staff Mem­ber/Postdoc­toral Re­searcher pos­i­tion on “Geo­spa­tial assess­ments of global raw ma­ter­ial ex­trac­tion and re­lated en­vir­on­mental and so­cial im­pacts” for Geo­grapher/Geo-In­form­at­ics (post-­doc, em­ployee sub­ject to the terms of the Col­lect­ive Bar­gain­ing Agree­ment for Uni­versity Staff - Anges­tellte/r gemäß Kollekt­iv­ver­trag für die Arbeit­nehmer/innen der Uni­versitäten; gross monthly salary on a full-­time basis, paid 14 times per year: Euro 3,626,60). This em­ployee pos­i­tion will be ini­tially lim­ited to a period of 3 years, start­ing on Janu­ary 1, 2018 (Note that a slightly dif­fer­ent start­ing date could be ne­go­ti­ated).

The re­search group “Sus­tain­able Re­source Use” at the In­sti­tute for Eco­lo­gical Eco­nom­ics of WU Vi­enna is one of the lead­ing European groups in the areas of nat­ural re­source ac­count­ing and in­dic­at­ors, mod­el­ing, and assess­ments fo­cus­ing on ma­ter­i­als, wa­ter, and land use.

This pos­i­tion is part of the ERC Con­sol­id­ator Grant pro­ject FINEPRINT (Spa­tially ex­pli­cit ma­ter­ial foot­prints: fine-s­cale assess­ment of Europe’s global en­vir­on­mental and so­cial im­pacts, led by Dr. Stefan Giljum. FINEPRINT devel­ops and ap­plies a new method for fine-s­cale assess­ments of global ma­ter­ial flows, in order to per­form spa­tially ex­pli­cit ana­lyses of ma­ter­ial foot­prints and re­lated en­vir­on­mental and so­cial im­pacts of European con­sump­tion.

Re­spons­ib­il­it­ies:

You will be lead­ing Work Pack­age 1 of the FINEPRINT pro­ject, which will per­form world-wide geo­spa­tial assess­ments of raw ma­ter­ial ex­trac­tion and re­lated en­vir­on­mental and so­cial im­pacts. You will be re­spons­ible for es­tab­lish­ing an in­teg­rated and con­sist­ent frame­work of de­tailed spa­tial ac­counts of ma­ter­ial ex­trac­tion (of at least 60 dif­fer­ent raw ma­ter­i­als in­clud­ing ag­ri­cul­tural, forestry and fish­ery products, fossil fuels, metal ores and non-­metal­lic min­er­als) and re­lated en­vir­on­mental and so­cial data (e.g. de­for­est­a­tion, spe­cies oc­cur­rence, wa­ter scarcity, so­cial con­flicts). To­gether with the other mem­bers of the WP 1 team, you will col­lect, val­id­ate and qual­ity-­con­trol a large num­ber of spa­tial and non-spa­tial global and re­gional data­sets with a vari­ety of data formats. Your tasks will also in­clude the pro­duc­tion of global crop and forest har­vest maps based on, e.g. avail­able land use and crop suit­ab­il­ity data. You will then per­form quant­it­at­ive-s­tat­ist­ical and qual­it­at­ive ana­lyses of the re­la­tions between trends and pat­terns of raw ma­ter­ial ex­trac­tion and re­lated en­vir­on­mental im­pacts, such as wa­ter scarcity and de­for­est­a­tion, as well as so­cial im­pacts, such as local con­flicts re­lated to min­ing pro­jects.

As WP 1 leader, you will head a small re­search team, con­sist­ing of 1-2 pre-­doc re­search­ers, a tech­nical assist­ant as well as a re­search assist­ant. You will also work closely with the mem­bers of the over­all FINEPRINT team, con­sist­ing of a total of 9 per­sons.

You are ex­pec­ted to pub­lish scien­ti­fic res­ults in high-im­pact journ­als. In ad­di­tion to re­search, teach­ing activ­it­ies on the bach­elor level might be ar­ranged.

The post holder will also be in­vited to con­trib­ute to the writ­ing of grant pro­pos­als that, when suc­cess­ful, might provide fund­ing to achieve full-­time em­ploy­ment and to ex­tend the post-­doc pos­i­tion to a period longer than three years.

Your pro­file:

Ap­plic­ants should have:

• A doc­toral de­gree or PhD in Geo­graphy, Geo-In­form­at­ics or re­lated sub­jects

• Pro­found ex­per­i­ence in hand­ling and auto­mated pro­cessing of large-s­cale, global (geo)data (sources, struc­ture, data types, qual­ity evalu­ation, script­ing/pro­gram­ming in R, Py­thon or other lan­guages)

• Ex­per­i­ence in build­ing and work­ing with (geo)data­bases

• Strong skills in the area of spa­tial stat­ist­ics (e.g. cluster ana­lysis, mul­tivari­ate re­gres­sion)

• In­terest in assess­ing and ab­il­ity to grasp the in­ter­re­la­tions between raw ma­ter­ial ex­trac­tion and re­lated im­pacts

• Ex­cel­lent writ­ten and com­mu­nic­a­tion skills in Eng­lish (know­ledge of Ger­man wel­come but not re­quired)

Refer­ence Num­ber: 3439

Ap­plic­a­tions can be sub­mit­ted on­line until Novem­ber 1, 2017.

All ap­plic­a­tions should in­clude:

• A cover let­ter describ­ing your mo­tiv­a­tion, re­search in­terests & rel­ev­ant ex­per­i­ence

• De­tailed cur­riculum vitae in tab­u­lar form

• A sample of your work rep­res­ent­at­ive for the job de­scrip­tion

Ap­ply here

You find all the in­form­a­tion to the cur­rent job-open­ing at WU and the ap­plic­a­tion pro­ced­ure un­der this link: ht­tps://www.wu.ac.at/en/ca­reers/ca­reer­s-at-wu/cur­rent-­job-open­ings/