Contrato de dos años como asistente de investigación en biodiversidad de anfibios y reptiles de Melanesia 🐢🐍🦎🐸

Oferta compartida por Nuria

Western Melanesia (including New Guinea) sits at the crossroads of Asia and Australia and is one of the most interesting, puzzling, and understudied hyper diverse regions on Earth. Clarifying how tectonic movements have sundered or joined different Melanesian landforms in the past several million years is key to understanding the origins of this biotic diversity. The Research Assistant will generate data to help us investigate how the diversity and evolutionary history of the five major geological landforms that comprise most of western Melanesia have impacted evolution of that region's biota and to identify those ancient insular landmasses critical in the origin of lineages that colonised and radiated across New Guinea, Australia, and/or insular Asia. The project will use herpetofauna (reptiles and amphibians) to address these evolutionary questions. The research will help to replace the outdated, unidirectional "out-of-New-Guinea" model for origins of Pacific biodiversity with a more dynamic and nuanced understanding that ancient, yet under-appreciated, land areas in Melanesia have long been important in shaping biotic evolution in the broader region. The project will use a combination of traditional sequencing methods alongside ultra-conserved elements from fresh and historic museum samples (aka archival DNA) and analyse these data with respect to new geological models to be generated by a project partner.

We are seeking to appoint a research assistant to help study the Origins of Western Melanesian Diversity on a 24 month, fixed-term contract. This project is funded by a joint NERC-NSF grant to Dr Simon Maddock (University of Wolverhampton, UK) and Dr Fred Kraus (University of Michigan, USA). The position will be based in the School of Sciences at the University of Wolverhampton, UK. You will possess the skills and knowledge to generate high-quality molecular sequence data.

You will have completed an MSc in biological sciences or an equivalent subject and have experience of molecular and phylogenetic methods. You will be responsible for generating sequence data (Sanger and sequence capture), analysing data, co-supervising lab work by undergraduate and postgraduate students, and, if interested, disseminating research. Good communication and organisational skills are essential attributes.

For more details and to apply please see https://jobs.wlv.ac.uk/vacancy/research-assistant-in-herpetological-genomics-496360.html

For an informal discussion about the post please contact Simon Maddock (s.maddock@wlv.ac.uk).