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2-Year Postdoctoral Position in Modeling of Microbial Soil Carbon Cycling

Postdoc of genome-informed microbial biogeochemical modeling

Department of Biology

Faculty of SCIENCE

University of Copenhagen

Soils store 2300 Pg of organic carbon – three times as much as in the atmosphere. Yet, the fate of these huge carbon stocks under integral warming remains highly uncertain. Although microorganisms are key players in soil carbon decomposition, large-scale models ignore microbial processes due to difficulty of quantifying microbial traits that can inform models. To overcome this limitation, the aim of this position is to quantify microbial traits from metagenomes to develop a microbial-explicit version of the dynamic vegetation model LPJ-GUESS.

You will join a dynamic team at the Center of Excellence VOLT (Center for Volatile interactions, https://volt.ku.dk/) consisting of microbial ecologists, biogeochemists and ecosystem modelers. We offer a creative and stimulating working environment in a collaborative, international research group.



We have state-of-the art laboratory facilities and bioninformatics pipelines for analyses of microbial communities and biogeochemical fluxes. Our team also comprises specialists in process-based ecosystem modeling with whom you will closely collaborate. We provide access to supercomputing facilities to carry out bioinformatics and modeling tasks.

You will work with microbial genomes and metagenomes to predict microbial traits relevant for carbon cycling and modeling using computational structural biology tools to infer protein function. These tasks will use public databases as well as environmental metagenomic datasets produced by the group. You will moreover work with the process-based ecosystem model LPJ-GUESS to implement microbial decomposition of soil organic matter.

We seek an ambitious and highly motivated candidate with a PhD in computational biology, environmental sciences or related fields. A

📌 2-Year Postdoctoral Position in Modeling of Microbial Soil Carbon Cycling (Asunción)
🏢 Department of Pharmacy, University of Copenhagen
📍 Asunción