Salary: UE07 £34,304 – £40,927 (per annum)
Location: College of Science and Engineering – School of GeoSciences
Duration: Fixed-term contract (15 months) – Full time
Interviews will be held at the end of May/start of June.
We are looking for a PDRA with a proven interest in how marine organisms respond to various stressors and the ability to design and run multiple stressor experiments. Cold-water corals are under threat from combined environmental and anthropogenic stressors. In order to understand how these vulnerable marine ecosystems will change in the coming decades, controlled experiments are required to test how single and multiple stressors will impact their survival and proliferation.
The PDRA will be primarily responsible for managing and conducting long-term multiple stressor experiments (deoxygenation, ocean acidification and changes in temperature) on the cold-water coral Lophelia pertusa. This will include physiological assessment of the coral health, manipulation and monitoring of seawater chemistry, and skeletal analysis of coral samples. The PDRA will analyse impacts of multiple stressors on L. pertusa to underpin work being done in the UK GRCF-funded One Ocean Hub (OOH) and the EU H2020-funded iAtlantic project to understand the impacts of climate change to cold-water coral reef framework, and what this may mean to these biodiversity rich ecosystems. The experiments will take place in the experimental mesocosms at the St Abbs. Marine Station.
The primary role of the PDRA is to lead on the long-term experimentation of Lophelia pertusa in multiple stressor systems. This includes husbandry of the live coral, modification of sampling points depending on preliminary data, managing the different experimental conditions (setting, monitoring and recording seawater parameters including carbonate chemistry), conducting periodic physiological measurements on L. pertusa including respiration and growth, and assessing skeletal characteristics of the coral skeletons. The PDRA would lead on the compilation, quality checking, refinement, and analysis of these different data types. A secondary role would be to document the processes involved and record these in a way to be used as a training tool for researchers interested in doing similar research.
The University of Edinburgh, 29 April 2022. More information.
