Research Associate § 28 Subsection 3 HmbHG

Duties primarily include research. Research associates may also pursue independent research and further academic qualifications. They may also pursue doctoral studies outside of working duties

Understanding the responses of organisms to environmental change is critical to managing and preserving biodiversity, especially in the light of global climate change. The aim of the project is to elucidate various mechanisms of rapid adaptive changes exemplarily in six subprojects using various biological collections of the University of Hamburg and the Leibnitz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity Change. Our approach is taxonomically and functionally broad, spanning genomic, molecular, morphological, physiological and community level analysis in animals, plants and fungi. We will apply experimental evolution, phylogenomics, network analyses as well as utilize the rich biological collections that have been capturing diversity over the past 200 years. This project is part of a research consortium that consists of six subprojects in total. Central to all projects is a data science approach to handle and analyze large and complex data. We search for skilled and motivated research associates for the following subproject.

Assessing and Understanding Changing Morphologies in an Era of Climate Change – Multi-Modal Analysis of Collections:
To understand the impact of climate change on species, scientific collections bear tremendous potential for novel insights. This project seeks to leverage this potential by using visual language models to increase the degree auf (semi-)automatized analysis. This encompasses a wide range of features ranging from color and size to hairiness of insects. As a large part of traditional assessment is a manual task, significant productivity gains are expected. Thus, enabling large scale comparisons and assessment of ecological environments on the development of species.

Further duties at the Hub of Computing and Data Science involve:

• consulting for scientists of all faculties about possibilities and implementations of data science solutions for research

• planning, implementation and maintenance of data science software

• development of all kinds of data-driven systems, all the way from advanced data analytics to multimodal transformer models

• requirements analysis with the prospective users (researchers of all fields)

• creation of user-friendly interfaces tied to expertise and needs of the users

• analysis and recommendation of state-of-the-art technologies for both models and infrastructure

• evaluation and quality assurance of the applications