PhD (f/m/x) Socioeconomic impacts of climate extremes from multilingual textual extraction

Place of work

Mariana Madruga de Brito (mariana.brito@ufz.de)
Tais Maria Nunes Carvalho (tais-maria.nunes-carvalho@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

• Develop and apply NLP models and/or LLMs to identify and extract qualitative and quantitative impact information of floods, droughts, storms, and heatwaves in Europe and Africa since 1950 from text data.
• Develop and apply machine learning models to estimate uncertainty in climate impact statements.
• Analyse spatial and temporal patterns and trends in climate-extreme impacts.
• Cross-validate the results with a series of modelled and observed impact data.
• Collaborate with other doctoral candidates within the CLIMES Doctoral Network.
• Disseminate results through peer-reviewed publications, conference presentations, and interdisciplinary collaboration.

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’
• 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, computer sciences, climate sciences, environmental sciences, environmental engineering, water resources, digital humanities, or related fields.
• The candidate can be of any nationality but must not have resided, worked, or studied for more than 12 months in the past 36 months in Germany.
• Have not yet been awarded a PhD degree.
• 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 disasters.
• Ability to work independently and collaboratively within an interdisciplinary research environment.
• Good command of written and spoken English.