Postdoctoral Research Associate- Ecology & Evolutionary Biology

Description

We're seeking a postdoctoral researcher to join our team in investigating an NSF-funded grant examining links between above- and belowground diversity across space and time in forests of the continental United States. The primary work of the postdoctoral researcher will be laboratory-based extraction and amplification of soil microbiomes followed by bioinformatic analysis of microbial diversity and composition. Additional tasks will include mentoring of undergraduate researchers and occasional field work at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) in Edgewater, Maryland and Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute (SCBI) in Front Royal, Virginia. The postdoctoral researcher will be based in the lab of Dr. Stephanie Kivlin at UTK (https://kivlinlab.github.io). However, the postdoctoral researcher will work collaboratively with the labs of Drs. Songlin Fei (https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~sfei/index.php), Rich Phillips (https://phillipslab.bio.indiana.edu), John Parker (https://serc.si.edu/labs/terrestrial-ecology), Melissa McCormick (https://serc.si.edu/labs/molecular-ecology) Grant Domke (https://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/people/gmdomke), and Liz LaRue (https://hb2504.utep.edu/Home/Profile?username=ealarue). The majority of the fieldwork will be conducted at SERC and SCBI, but occasional travel to Indiana (for project meetings) is anticipated.