Research Fellow – Mathematical & Computational Ecology Full-time

Research Fellow – Mathematical & Computational Ecology

This is an exciting opportunity to join an interdisciplinary team of researchers at UCL to develop new statistical approaches to forecast how forest ecosystems will respond to environmental change. This project is part of a 5-year ERC Starting Grant, supervised by Dr Maynard, which aims to develop a novel framework to forecast survival and responsiveness of communities under disturbance. The research fellow will primarily be based at the People and Nature Lab at the new UCL East campus—a collaborative group of researchers addressing the intersection between biodiversity, technology, computer science, the built environment, and society to create new ways for societies and nature to sustainably coexist.

Your role will be to help design and develop a new suite of computational and statistical tools for forecasting the stability of ecological communities under environmental change. This will involve combining tools from across parametric statistics, machine learning, dynamical systems, and deep learning to build and benchmark novel computational approaches against large, real-world datasets. The initial focus will be on Bayesian hierarchical modelling, but the role will demand moving fluidly between methodological frameworks and tools to overcome computational challenges as they arise. The primary application will centre on using environmental, functional, and phylogenetic data to predict forest community composition, with existing plant, aquatic, and microbial datasets used for model testing and development.

This is a fixed-term role for 24 months, with the possibility to extend. Start date is negotiable, but ideally as soon as possible (Q3 of 2026).

Appointment at Grade 7 is dependent upon having been awarded a PhD; if this is not the case, initial appointment will be at Grade 6B (salary £34,502 – £36,348 per annum) with payment at Grade 7 being backdated to the date of final submission of the PhD Thesis. This appointment is subject to UCL Terms and Conditions of Service for Research and Professional Services Staff. Please visit https://www.ucl.ac.uk/human-resources/conditions-service-research-teaching-and-professional-services-staff for more information.

Interviews will take place in the early summer, 2026.

A job description and person specification can be accessed at the bottom of this page.

If you have any queries about the role, please contact Dr Daniel Maynard, daniel.maynard@ucl.ac.uk

If you need reasonable adjustments or a more accessible format to apply for this job online or have any queries about the application process, please contact Biosciences staffing at biosciences.staffing@ucl.ac.uk.