Fingerprinting marine plankton communities through statistical analysis of optical data

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

Title
Fingerprinting marine plankton communities through statistical analysis of optical data

Research area and project description
New data-rich technologies for monitoring the marine environment are emerging, posing challenges for processing and interpreting data, and converting these into ecological meaningful information. Phytoplankton monitoring is traditionally monitored using microscopy, a method that is time-consuming and prone to large human biases. Optical methods, such as pulse-shape recording flow cytometry and image-in-flow microscope, produce large amounts of data that can be used for fingerprinting plankton cells at relevant taxonomical resolution as well as potentially assessing their fitness. Automated analyses of such data will allow for higher throughput and thereby, greater insights into plankton community structures and the drivers of these as well as their role in marine food webs.

This project aims to develop statistical and/or artificial intelligence methods to analyse data from these new technologies and compare them with traditional plankton monitoring techniques. The project also aims at demonstrating how this information improves our understanding of the factors regulating plankton communities by combing data from these technologies with ancillary meteorological and water quality observations. Obtaining high-frequency data, unaffected by human biases, will improve our understanding of ecological interactions in the plankton community. Extensive data sets for exploring these new technologies have already been collected and preprocessed for this project, but establishing new data sets through experiments and intensive field sampling campaigns is also envisaged. The project will involve collaboration with other scientific institutions in Europe.

The successful outcome of this project has the potential to define the next generation of monitoring plankton communities, which will gain large interest from scientists and environmental agencies. The general applicability of developed methods is essential to the project and the developed methods should be made publicly available to the different stakeholders.

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 must have a relevant Master’s degree (120 ECTS) or at least one year of a Master’s degree in statistics, environmental science, mathematics, or related discipline. Programming experience with data analysis tools such as R, MatLab, Python, etc. are also required. Basic understanding of marine ecology and phytoplankton data is an advantage.

Place of employment and place of work:
The place of employment is Aarhus University, and the place of work is Department of Ecoscience, Aarhus University, Frederiksborgvej 399, 4000 Roskilde, Denmark

Contacts
Applicants seeking further information are invited to contact:

• Jacob Carstensen, [email protected] (main supervisor)
• Hans Jacobsen, [email protected] (co-supervisor)

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

Application deadline is 15 February 2025at 23:59 CET

Preferred starting date is 01 April 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.