PhD Researcher (f/m/x) in In4Nile PhD-Cohort: Monitoring water quality impacts using NLP and LLMs (f/m/x)

Place of work

Working time

Contract limitations

Salary

Contact

Your contact for any questions you may have about the job:
Tais Maria Nunes Carvalho (tais-maria.nunes-carvalho@ufz.de)
Mariana Madruga de Brito (mariana.brito@ufz.de)

Your application

Please submit your application via our online portal with your cover letter, CV (please omit your photo, age, or marital status) and relevant attachments.

Diversity and Inclusion

The UFZ has a strong commitment to diversity and actively supports equal opportunities for all employees regardless of their origin, religion, ideology, disability, age or sexual identity.
We look forward to applications from people who are open-minded and enjoy working in diverse teams.

Your tasks

• Conduct an AI-assisted systematic review of pollutants in the Nile Basin using multilingual scientific databases.
• Use text classification and LLM-driven information extraction to identify pollutants, their sources, and the locations of affected areas across scientific literature, reports, and media news.
• Compare public and institutional narratives with scientific evidence and biophysical data on water pollution.
• Develop a Nile Basin knowledge-retrieval chatbot to deliver referenced, uncertainty-aware answers.
• Communicate results through scientific publications, presentations, and collaborative work within an interdisciplinary team of the In4Nile cohort.

We offer

• Excellent supervision and optimal professional and interdisciplinary qualification through our HIGRADE graduate programme
• The freedom to master even the most demanding challenges between basic research and practical application
• The opportunity to work in interdisciplinary, international teams and benefit from a wide range of perspectives
• Firstclass integration into national and international research networks to work together on global challenges
• Excellent research infrastructure and research data management to optimally support your work
• A wide range of options for balancing care responsibilities and work through our family office
• Competent support and advice for international colleagues arriving at the UFZ from the ‘International Office’
• Special annual payment, capital-forming benefits and subsidised Deutschland-Job-Ticket
• A workplace in a vibrant region with a high life quality and social and cultural diversity

Your profile

• Master’s degree (or equivalent) in geography, computational social sciences, digital humanities, computer sciences, environmental sciences, environmental engineering, water resources, or related fields.
• Good command of scientific programming (e.g., Python or R) Experience in handling large datasets is an advantage.
• Interest in natural language processing, text mining, and machine learning.
• Interest in the societal consequences of water pollution.
• Ability to work independently and collaboratively within an interdisciplinary research environment.
• Good command of written and spoken English.