At the Department of Chemistry and Bioscience at Aalborg University, Denmark, one or more PhD stipend(s) are available within the general study programme Biotechnology, Chemistry and Environmental Engineering.

The stipend(s) is open for appointment from 1 August 2018 or soon thereafter. The PhD position(s) is located within the Center for Microbial Communities – with working place in Aalborg, Denmark.

Job description

• The research is a part of the project “Illumination of Microbial Dark Matter“ funded by the Villum Foundation.
• In our ongoing world-wide investigations of microbial communities in wastewater treatment systems and anaerobic digesters, we have revealed the identity of many of the abundant microbes. However, we are missing knowledge about factors determining their presence and it is still impossible to predict and model their presence and the dynamics of the communities.
• The aim of this project is to apply multivariate statistical methods and various metrics to model the composition and dynamics of the communities. Extensive times series of metadata and community data from a number of full-scale and pilot-scale treatment plants are available for detailed analyses.

The candidate

• will have  a proven research record in studies of microbial communities by 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing and with extensive experience with R statistical language, correlation analyses and multivariate statistics.

You may obtain further information from Professor Per Halkjær Nielsen, phone: +45 2173 5089 or by email: phn@bio.aau.dk concerning the scientific aspects of the stipend.