Discovery and physiology of soil viruses

Applicants are invited for a PhD fellowship/scholarship at Graduate School of Technical Sciences, Aarhus University, Denmark, within the Agroecology programme. The position is available from 01 June 2025 or later. You can submit your application via the link under 'how to apply'.

Title
Discovery and physiology of soil viruses

Research area and project description
Soil is the most diverse environment on Earth, and an important sink for atmospheric carbon. My recently EU-funded project will investigate the potential role viral infection plays in soil carbon sequestration.

I am looking for a PhD student to characterize the life cycle of phages that infect Actinobacteria in soil. The work entails culturing of Actinobacteria from different types of soil, culturing phages that infect Actinobacteria and performing experiments in a microbiology wet lab to study viral characteristics such as burst size, host range and genome content. During this project we will build new phage-host model systems and generate data necessary to model the contribution of viruses to carbon cycling and sequestration in soil.

The project will take place at Flakkebjerg, a small but very international campus in rural Denmark that hosts part of the Agroecology department of Aarhus University. Candidates of any nationality possessing relevant experience are encouraged to apply.

Project description
For technical reasons, you must upload a project description. Please simply copy the project description above and upload it as a PDF in the application.

Qualifications and specific competences
Applicants to the PhD position must have a relevant Master’s degree in microbiology, virology or related field.

• Familiarity with aseptic technique and basic work in a wet lab
• Good communication skills in English

Preferred skills

• Culturing bacteria
• Culturing phages
• Extraction of nucleic acids
• Performing genomic analysis methods such as identifying ORFs, annotation and taxonomy assignment
• Constructing phylogenetic trees
• Statistical analysis in R or Python
• Scientific writing

The applicant may also include other documents such as a certificate of English language proficiency (e.g. IELTS, TOEFL test scores), proof of research experience etc.

Place of employment and place of work
The place of employment is Aarhus University, and the place of work is Institut for Agroøkologi Entomologi og Plantepatologi, Forsøgsvej 1, 4200 Slagelse, Danmark.

Contacts
Applicants seeking further information are invited to contact:

• Mogens Nicolaisen, [email protected] (main supervisor)
• Ella Tali Sieradzki, [email protected] (co-supervisor)

How to apply
Please follow this link to submit your application.

Application deadline is 01 February 2025 at 23:59 CET

Preferred starting date is 01 June 2025

For information about application requirements and mandatory attachments, please see our application guide.

Please note:

• Only documents received prior to the application deadline will be evaluated. Thus, documents sent after deadline will not be taken into account.
• The programme committee may request further information or invite the applicant to attend an interview.
• Shortlisting will be used, which means that the evaluation committee only will evaluate the most relevant applications.

Aarhus University’s ambition is to be an attractive and inspiring workplace for all and to foster a culture in which each individual has opportunities to thrive, achieve and develop. We view equality and diversity as assets, and we welcome all applicants. All interested candidates are encouraged to apply, regardless of their personal background. Salary and terms of employment are in accordance with applicable collective agreement.