The University of Edinburgh, a partner organization in ENVRIplus, is looking for a Postdoctoral Research Associate working on the  ENVRI Reference model

Applications are invited for a Postdoctoral Research Associate in distributed research infrastructures as part of the EU Horizon 2020 ENVRIplus project. We are working with 23 ESFRI strategic research infrastructures to advance methods of exploiting environmental science data. We are developing and validating a reference model that describes the data lifecycle in distributed systems, to form a foundation for common strategies and solutions to sustain research infrastructures on a long term basis. https://www.envriplus.eu/

The Research Associate will join a task force that is co-designing and evaluating the project’s reference model. We will be particularly concerned with creating intellectual ramps to improve its usability, and with developing its engineering viewpoint by considering the distributed and automated architectures needed for sustained data-intensive federation, where independent autonomous organisations agree to pool effort and resources to make compositions of their data easy for researchers to use. Results should be applicable in all four environmental science domains: biosphere, atmosphere, marine and solid Earth.

The Research Associate will be prepared to enter enthusiastically into multi-site interdisciplinary teams in order to help develop understanding and results. This work will be conducted via intensive video-communication, agile collaboration tools and twice-yearly one-week meetings in Europe. It will be necessary to invest in practical implementation experiments, and analysis of architectural, engineering and technological choices. The Research Associate will take responsibility for written reports, papers and training material.

Fixed-term: The full-time post is available from 1st January 2017 for a period of 12 months.

More information is available on the University’s website.