The Climate and Environmental Remote Sensing group of the Department of Geodesy and Geoinformation of TU Wien develops long-term remote sensing datasets of soil moisture and vegetation and uses them to address urgent climatological and environmental issues. For a new research project, called Fire in the Future: Interactions with Ecosystems and Society (FURNACES), we seek a motivated

PhD student in Vegetation Model-Data Integration

FURNACES is an interdisciplinary project between partners from Austria (TU Wien and BOKU) and Germany (Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre, KIT/IMK-IFU Garmisch-Partenkirchen, and TU Dresden) with backgrounds in remote sensing, ecosystem modelling and social ecology. The project aims at improving our understanding of current and future interactions between ecosystems, wildfires, and societies. The selected candidate at TU Wien will develop machine learning approaches to derive relationships between socioeconomic drivers and fire dynamics from state-of-the-art satellite and climate observations as well as socio-economic data bases and use these to assess and reformulate present-day global vegetation-fire models. Our research partners will use your results to improve the representation of humans in global fire models and conduct simulations to assess the impact of future fires on ecosystems. Thus, frequent research exchange visits to our project partners will be natural part of the job.

Your profile

• Master degree in environmental sciences, geodesy, geoinformation sciences, information sciences, physics, geography, or similar
• Strong statistical skills
• Profound programming skills (e.g. Python, R, Matlab, C++)
• Experience in remote sensing
• Experience in environmental modelling
• Willingness to work together with natural and social scientists in an interdisciplinary, international project
• Ambition to pursue a PhD dissertation
• Good written and spoken communication skills in English

We offer

• The opportunity to work in an innovative, motivated and successful team
• Workplace in the city center of Vienna
• Flexible working hours
• A stimulating and friendly working environment at the department
• The extent of the employment will be 30 h/week
• The salary for this position is based on the Austrian regulations for university staff. The monthly minimum gross salary is € 2.148,38 for a 30 h/week employment and is paid 14 times per year.
• Envisaged start date is December 1st, 2019 and will be limited to 3 years.

If this job opportunity fits your ambition we are looking forward to receiving your application (cover letter, CV, relevant references and possible publications) in English as a single PDF file via e-mail to rs-sek@geo.tuwien.ac.at. Candidate selection will start on October 1st, 2019 and will continue until a suitable candidate is found. TU Wien will not refund any cost occurring in the course of the application.
For further information, please contact Prof. Wouter Dorigo at wouter.dorigo@tuwien.ac.at.