post-doc: ecological statistician -- St. Andrews

[cooch]

Quantitative Ecologist/Statistician (2 posts available) – Ref SB2276

Description

School of Mathematics and Statistics, Centre for Research into Ecological and Environmental Modelling (CREEM), Salary: £29,972-£35,788 pa, Start: 2 April 2012 or as soon as possible thereafter, Fixed Term: 3 years

Details

Applications are invited for two Postdoctoral Research Fellows (PDRFs) on a new research project to start April 2012. The project entitled MOCHA – “Multi-study OCean acoustics Human effects Analysis” is a large, international collaborative project with the funded posts based within CREEM at the University of St Andrews. The research is funded by the United States Office of Naval Research.

There is currently great concern about the impacts of man-made noise in the oceans on marine fauna. Behavioural Response Studies (BRSs) are experiments aimed at directly quantifying the relationship between potential anthropogenic disturbances and their effect on the behaviour of specific marine mammals. The United States Navy is making a substantial investment in BRS studies, aimed at understanding the effect of active sonar on species of concern. Despite the difficulties of conducting such experiments in the field and analysing such complex data, we believe that substantial progress can be made to enhance the inferences drawn from existing and future BRS data. We will achieve this by bringing together researchers undertaking BRS studies and statisticians specializing in the analysis of biological experiments of this kind in a working group format, with dedicated researcher effort between group meetings.

We require two post-doctoral researchers to work within this project. You will either be a statistician or ecologist with demonstrable experience in quantitative methods with a PhD in statistics, mathematics, ecology, or a related quantitative discipline. A broad interest or experience in the field of marine mammal biology, animal behaviour or phase 1 clinical trials would be advantageous.

Informal enquiries to Dr Catriona Harris, e-mail: catriona@mcs.st-and.ac.uk or Dr Len Thomas, e-mail: lt5@st-andrews.ac.uk.

Further details, including application details, are available from
https://www.vacancies.st-andrews.ac.uk/
under reference number SB2276
A direct link to the above page is http://tiny.cc/bpzmu
In particular, see the link to "Further Particulars" at the bottom of that page.