Research Technician

Hours of work:
Full-time - 35 hours per week

Tenure:
Fixed term for 2 years

We are seeking a highly motivated, reliable and committed research technician to join the School of Environmental Sciences Technical Services Team to support research in Tropical Ecology. This is an exciting and varied post supporting the provision of an effective and efficient technical service supporting a climate monitoring project within tropical forest environments and the development of seed spectroscopy capabilities.

The role will be line managed by the School's Technical Services Team Leader, with close liaison with Dr Belen Fadrique for day-to-day management.

You will be responsible for providing technical support for Dr Belen Fadrique's research project ‘Tropical mountains as contemporary refugia to climate change’. You will be responsible for liaising with external collaborators to support the building and programming of climate stations following Free station manuals to monitor macro climate in tropical mountain regions of Central and South America, Africa and the Pacific. This will also involve training field teams in the installation and maintenance of climate stations, supervise data collection and troubleshoot issues with instrumentation.

You will also support the wider project team, including the development of protocols to analyse seed spectroscopy with an FT-IR Spectrometer.

This post involves significant periods of fieldwork (approximately 4-5 months per year total) in tropical mountain locations such as Panama, Ecuador, Bolivia, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania, Papua New Guinea and Indonesia.

• Lead the technical coordination, installation and commissioning of climate monitoring stations in remote international field locations.
• Assemble climate stations, microclimate sensors and dendrometers.
• Coordinate the organisation and deployment of equipment in the field, including administrative tasks such as obtaining permits and arranging contracts.
• Install climate stations and sensors in a variety of tropical mountain forests with planned locations including Panama, Bolivia, Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea.
• Organise and supervise equipment maintenance and remote data acquisition.
• Prepare and run cellulose samples from tree cores for processing in the mass-spectrometer laboratory.
• Develop seed spectroscopy protocols and prepare and run seed spectroscopy samples
• Provide technical and logistical support for other lab projects as required such as flowering monitoring under warming conditions or monitoring of UK long term monitoring plot in the Forest of Dean.

We are committed to enhancing a workforce as diverse as our community and particularly encourage applicants who are of minoritised genders and ethnic backgrounds, living with a disability, and/or are members of the LGBTQIA+ community.