Opportunities
Specific Opportunities:
We have no specific opportunities at present.
General Enquiries:
I am always interested to here from potential PhD students and post-docs. If you are interested, please contact me and send a CV. We strive to be a welcoming, friendly group that fosters a healthy research culture and work-life balance. Please see our group's guiding principles for more details on our approach to conducting research. Regardless of your background, you will be very welcome in the research group. We are particularly keen to welcome enquiries from members of groups traditionally under-represented in academic research.
Please bear in mind the following considerations before making an enquiry.
- Are you a good fit for our group? Our group's research interests are in broad-scale biodiversity changes, and we are particularly interested in the roles of habitat loss and climate change in these changes. We are also interested in the consequences of biodiversity changes through ecosystem service provision. We focus primarily on terrestrial systems. I very much welcome enquiries from people having a different perspective or research topic, but there must be some link to these broad areas of interest.
- Do you have the right skills? Most of our research is desk-based, and consists of statistical analysis, modelling and projection. You are very welcome to propose research that involves a field or lab component, but I will expect there to be some link into our analysis and modelling work. Most people joining our group have some experience of data handling, data analysis and statistics. Ideally, it would be great if you have experience of using the R software environment, but we will of course provide training.
- Make sure you show you could fit into the group. When you send an enquiry, please give enough detail to know that you are a serious applicant with knowledge of the relevant subject area. Please explain why your research interests fit our group's research, and how you propose to fund your research (see below for funding opportunities). And please send a short CV.
Funding for PhDs:
There are a number of funding options for PhDs in our department:- The London NERC DTP. This is the source of most PhD funding at the moment. Please note that we don't recruit students directly for the DTP. You are admitted onto the programme, and then you choose supervisors. This means that there is no guarantee which supervisors you will end up working with, but there are loads of great supervisors across the DTP, so you should apply anyway!
- UCL Research Scholarships. UCL's Graduate Research Scholarship provides funding for students from any country. This scheme is intensely competitive. To have a chance of success, you will need to have a very good masters degree and/or published papers. You need a UCL sponsor to apply. If you are interested to apply to study in our group, please contact me as soon as possible before the deadline (which occurs annually in January).
- Ad-hoc Schemes. Occasionally, we receive funding to recruit students directly into the research group. These opportunities will be advertised under Specific Opportunities, above.
- Personal Funding. Students sometimes fund their own PhD research. However, note that with fees and living costs, funding a PhD is very expensive. It can be possible to secure your own funding, for example from scholarship schemes or crowd-funding.
Funding for Post-doctoral Research:
- Personal fellowships. These can either be junior fellowships, where you would join a research group to conduct post-doctoral research under supervision, or senior fellowships, which enable you to establish an independent research career with your own research group. I am happy both to supervise junior research fellowships or to sponsor applications for senior research fellowships. Note that our department has an established procedure for selecting candidates for senior research fellowships. For full details on the procedures for applying for fellowships, as well as a list of possible funding sources, see the departmental webpage. Do get in touch if you would like to discuss possibilities.
- Existing research grants. When I secure grant funding, opportunities will be advertised under Specific Opportunities above, as well as on the UCL website and on jobs.ac.uk. Feel free to get in touch to enquire about forthcoming opportunities.
- Co-written research grants. Even if we don't have existing grant funds, I am always delighted to develop ideas for a research proposal together with potential post-docs. Whether or not I am able and willing to take this on at any time will depend on other commitments and responsibilities, so please get in touch as early as possible to discuss options.