Vacant PhD Study Position in Barcelona
(fellowship for studies towards a PhD degree)
Deadline for applications: 30 June 2008 (late applications may be considered)
Announcement
The ELSA network invites applications for a PhD study position at the Departament d'Astronomia i Meteorologia, University of Barcelona (Spain) for research on Refinement of the Universe model in the Gaia simulator.
The deadline for applications is 30 June 2008 (later applications may still be considered).
The fellow will be appointed for a period of 3 or 4 years under employment contracts with the University of Barcelona as ELSA partner. The appointment will start at soon as possible. The fellow will be payed a competitive salary corresponding to the Marie Curie RTN grant scheme, including full social benefits.
The network endeavors to ensure a fair representation of men and women among the appointed researchers, and therefore especially encourages female candidates.
Who can apply?
In order to be eligible for this PhD position, the candidate must satisfy the following conditions (see flowchart for further information):
Level of experience: The candidate must be an "Early Stage Researcher" (ESR), i.e. without a PhD degree and with at most 4 years of research or research training since obtaining a degree that gives access to doctoral studies in the country where the degree was obtained. In general, this means at most 4 years after the diploma/master thesis.
Mobility: The candidate should not be of Spanish nationality, and should not have resided in Spain for more than 1 out of the last 3 years before the appointment.
Nationality: The candidate should normally be a national of an EU Member State (except Spain), or of an Associated State, or have been resident in such a country for at least 4 out of the last 5 years before the appointment. However, candidates of other nationalities will also be considered.
How to apply
Application should be submitted by e-mail to Dr. Jordi Torra (jordi@am.ub.es), with cc to the network coordinator (lennart@astro.lu.se).
Please include the text "Application for ELSA position in Barcelona" in the e-mail subject header.
The application should include:
- A detailed curriculum vitae (including a list of university courses and grades)
- List of publications (if relevant)
- The names, titles, functions and contact details of three reference persons (e.g. thesis advisor and two other professors), including their e-mail addresses
- A short letter explaining the candidate's motivation for applying and why he or she would be suitable for the position
- The title and abstract of the candidate's master thesis
- If possible, a link to the full master thesis. If the thesis is not available on-line, be prepared to send it upon request by e-mail or post. (Do not send it as an attachment to the application!)
Description of research project
Title: Refinement of the Universe model in the Gaia simulator
Description: This is a PhD study position for work on refining the simulation of the sky as observed by Gaia. The current Gaia simulator is based on several modules for simulation of different types of objects in the sky. The main one of them is the already quite detailed Besançon Galaxy model; further evolution and complexification of this model is desired for three purposes:
- Allowing a more realistic representation of the galactic stellar content, including elements not presently included (i.e. stellar clusters) or included in an oversimplified way (i.e. variables, rare stellar types). This will allow a better coverage of the data reduction needs.
- A refinement of the physics of the model, evolving towards the next generation of galaxy models including features like dynamical self-consistency. This will allow a better preparation of the future scientific exploitation of the Gaia results.
- Streamlining and optimisation of the implementation, allowing the generation of the very large simulations (more than a billion objects) needed for testing and validating the Gaia data reduction algorithms. This will require the tailoring of the simulator for execution in large parallel/distributed systems using the Grid Superscalar framework adopted for the development.
The thesis work could optionally include some observational campaigns for the validation of the simulation predictions.
Requirements: Good programming skills are required. Knowledge of Java will be an advantage.