The appointment is for one year (with potential for renewal), to begin as
soon as possible.
The scientific goal of this project is to examine the abiotic and biotic
predictors of diversity in fungal, bacterial, and viral symbiont communities
of plant hosts, and determine plant microbiome effects on disease
transmission. Experiments will encompass scales ranging from individual
hosts and local host communities to regional and global spatial scales.
Research will use high-throughput sequencing, culturing, and manipulative
experiments to estimate diversity in microbial communities and examine the
effects of these microbial communities on host pathogen resistance, and on
microbial fitness and transmission. Additional opportunities include work
with mathematical modelers to test predictive models. We are particularly
interested in applicants with metagenomics and fungal or bacterial
organismal expertise in microbial biology and training in community ecology
or evolutionary biology. Successful applicants will have experience and
ability in laboratory techniques necessary for high-throughput sequencing
and quantitative skills for manipulating and analyzing metagenomic,
ecological or evolutionary datasets, as well as the capacity to work well in
this collaborative research project. A conceptual overview of the larger
project is described in Borer et al. 2013 (found at:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.
Questions about this position should be addressed to Dr. Georgiana May
(gmay@umn.edu) and Dr. Linda Kinkel (kinkel@umn.edu).
Review of applications will begin on 15 March 2015. Apply for this position
via the University of Minnesota Office of Human Resources website:
employment.umn.edu/applicants/
