I am hiring PhD students and postdocs for a recently funded ERC Consolidator Grant project EPIDEMICSonCHIP. Aim of this project is to understand how social insects, particularly ants, collectively defend their colonies from disease and prevent epidemics in their societies; we will seek new approaches to determine how individual behaviours interact and lead to the emergent property of colony-level defences. To this end, we will build an automatised ant nest to track and manipulate ant interactions in the presence of pathogens, elucidating how both the pathogens and information about the health state of colony members is transmitted through the colony.
The project will be embedded in the existing Social Immunity Team at the IST Austria:
http://ist.ac.at/research-groups-pages/cremer-group/
The engineering of the automatised ant nest will be performed in collaboration and with extended stays in the laboratory of Ofer Feinerman, Weizmann Institute of Science.
If you are interested to join the team, it would be beneficial to have previous experience and a strong interest in either:
Behavioural observations and social interaction network analyses
Analysis of chemical interactions in ants (GC-MS)
Molecular tools (e.g. quantitative PCR)
Engineering and coding (preferred: good demand of Python and digital image analysis software, such as OpenCV)
Location: Klosterneuburg, close to Vienna, Austria
Salary (before tax): PhD student (1st year to Qualifying exam: ?29,554 gross/year for BSc holders, ?32,746 gross/year for MSc holders, ?35,938 gross/year after Qualifying Exam); Postdoc from ?50,316 gross/year)
Hours / Contract type: Full time / fixed-term contract, max. duration 5 y
Please send an email of interest (as a single pdf file including a letter of motivation, a short summary of research interests, a CV, certificates, and contacts of two potential referees) via e-mail to sylvia.cremer@ist.ac.at
deadline for application for the IST Austria Graduate School PhD positions is January 8th, 2018
For PhD positions, it is additionally required to apply to the IST Graduate School (https://phd.pages.ist.ac.at/biology/), with application deadline: January 8th, 2018