"Postdoctoral Research Associate in Physical Geography (Job Number: 25000810)"

Postdoctoral Research Associate in Physical Geography (Job Number: 25000810)

Department of Geography

Grade 7: - £38,249 - £40,497 per annum

Fixed Term - Full Time

Contract Duration: 29 Months

Contracted Hours per Week: 35

Working Arrangements: TBC

Closing Date: 06-Aug-2025, 6:59:00 AM

Disclosure and Barring Service Requirement: Not Applicable.

Working at Durham University  

A globally outstanding centre of teaching and research excellence, a warm and friendly place to work, a unique and historic setting – Durham is a university like no other.

As one of the UK’s leading universities, Durham is an incredible place to define your career.  The University is located within a beautiful historic city, home to a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and surrounded by stunning countryside. Our talented scholars and researchers from around the world are tackling global issues and making a difference to people's lives.  

We believe that inspiring our people to do outstanding things at Durham enables Durham people to do outstanding things in the world. Being a part of Durham is about more than just the success of the University, it’s also about contributing to the success of the city, county and community.

Our University Strategy is built on three pillars of research, education and wider student experience, but also on our keen sense of community and of inspiring others to achieve their potential. 

Our Purpose and Values

We want our University to be a place where people can be free to be themselves, no matter what their identity or background. Together, we celebrate difference, value one another and are each responsible for creating an inclusive community that is respectful and fair for all.

Find out more about the benefits of working at the University and what it is like to live and work in the Durham area on our Why Join Us? - Information Page

The Role and Department

The Department of Geography at Durham comprises 65 academic staff (approximately equally divided between Human and Physical geography), a graduate school of around 100 research students, around 40 taught postgraduate students and 850 undergraduates. The Department is well supported with technical staff, including a cartography unit, and administrative staff.

The Department was ranked joint first for research quality among UK geography departments in REF2021.  54% of our outputs were classed as ‘world leading’ and more than 92% as ‘world leading’ or internationally excellent’.  The most recent QS rankings for Geography placed Durham 16^th overall in the world.  The department is recurrently ranked in the top handful of programmes in the UK by various league tables; for example, we were ranked 1^st in the 2025 Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide, and 4th in the 2025 Complete University Guide.

Our aim is to sustain and support hubs of leadership in geographical scholarship – broadly conceived. We will maintain our reputation for theoretical and conceptual innovation so that we are shaping and leading debates globally.

We will continue to engage concepts and materials from across disciplinary boundaries to renew geographical scholarship and bring geographical perspectives to bear in other domains. We work across every continent and most major oceans and embrace the full diversity of methods and data available to the discipline.

We are further developing our core undergraduate programmes and will be recruiting world leading staff accordingly to ensure these programmes continue to offer the highest quality of education that develop students with skills to advance scholarly and public debates to which geography is central. The quality of our undergraduate students, and the degree programmes which ensue, combine with our large graduate school to provide a teaching experience for staff that is truly excellent.

The Role

Applications are invited for a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the field of Quantitative Sedimentology and Geophysics of Seafloor Processes. The successful applicant will be part of two major NERC funded projects to make the first detailed measurements of turbidity currents in action in the deep-sea, and to develop novel technologies for monitoring these seabed sediment flows. Turbidity currents form the deepest canyons, longest channels and largest sediment accumulations on our planet. They also break seafloor telecommunication cable networks that form the backbone of global data transfer, and there is emerging understand that they bury globally significant amounts of organic carbon in the deep-sea. This is an exciting and inspiring opportunity to analyse the first measurements of turbidity currents in the deep-sea. This data can lead to step changes in understanding how these seabed sediment flows operate, and their wider implications for hazards to telecommunication cables, organic carbon transfer and sequestration, impacts on seabed life, or role in transferring microplastics and other pollutants. 

The successful application will part of two major international projects have already involved four marine research cruises to the Congo Submarine Canyon and Fan in 2019, 2020, 2024 and 2025. Those month-long marine cruises have already generated a superb field data-set that includes monitoring of the longest sediment flows yet measured in action on Earth, and the only time-lapse bathymetric surveys of a major submarine canyon-channel. The most recent cruise in 2025 showed that the end of the Congo Submarine Channel is highly active (15% of the time), despite being 1,000 km from shore, and this seafloor channel grew by 10 km in a single year.

These two NERC projects will also underpin another two marine research cruises in March-April 2026 and 2027. These future cruises will deploy moored sensors (e.g. acoustic Doppler current profilers - ADCPs) in a series of submarine canyons in the Gulf of Mexico and along the US East Coast. Time-lapse bathymetric surveys and sediment cores will also be collected again during these cruises in 2026 and 2027, which also aim to test novel geophone-based seabed sensors.

The Postdoctoral Research Associate will benefit from being part of an unusually large international project team including scientists from the UK Universities of Durham, Newcastle, Hull, Loughborough, and the UK National Oceanography Centre, together with collaborators at IFREMER in France, GEOMAR in Germany and MBARI in the USA.

The successful application will assist in analysing field data including from moored-sensors (e.g. acoustic Doppler current profilers), time-lapse bathymetric and sub-bottom profiler surveys of the seabed, and sediment cores. They may also assist in analysis of monitoring data from Ocean Bottom Seismometers and Hydrophones. These data sets include those already collected from the Congo Submarine Canyon in previous marine cruises, and data collected by future cruises to the Gulf of Mexico and US East Coast. The aims of these analyses include to understand: the frequency and triggers of turbidity currents, what these flows comprise and how they behave, and how they sculpt the seafloor or are recorded by their deposits. The successful applicant will ideally also seek to understand the wider implications of these flows, such as for hazards to seabed cables, and processes of organic carbon burial or pollutant transfer to the deep sea. They will ideally take part in two forthcoming marine campaigns to the Gulf of Mexico and US East Coast in 2026 and 2027 and thereby help to collect data onboard research vessels. They will also be involved in planning logistics for these two marine research cruises, and in analysing, publishing and archiving a range of field data after the marine research cruises have finished.  

Key responsibilities:

• To understand and convey material of a specialist or highly technical nature to the team or group of people through presentations and discussions that leads to the presentation of research papers in conferences and publications.
• To prepare and deliver presentations on research outputs/activities to audiences which may include: research sponsors, academic and non-academic audiences.
• To publish high quality outputs, including papers for submission to peer reviewed journals and papers for presentation at conferences and workshops under the direction of the Principal Investigator or Grant-holder.
• To assist with the development of research objectives and proposals, including planning of marine cruises.
• To conduct individual and collaborative research projects under the direction of the Principal Investigator or Grant-holder.
• To work with the Principal Investigator or Grant-holder and other colleagues in the research group, as appropriate, to identify areas for research, develop new research methods and extend the research portfolio.
• To deal with problems that may affect the achievement of research objectives and deadlines by discussing with the Principal Investigator or Grant-holder and offering creative or innovative solutions.
• To liaise with research colleagues and make internal and external contacts to develop knowledge and understanding to form relationships for future research collaboration.
• To plan and manage own research activity, research resources in collaboration with others and contribute to the planning of research projects including marine cruises.
• To deliver training in research techniques/approaches to peers, visitors and students as appropriate.
• To be involved in student supervision, as appropriate, and assist with the assessment of the knowledge of students.
• To contribute to fostering a collegial and respectful working environment which is inclusive and welcoming and where everyone is treated fairly with dignity and respect.
• To engage in wider citizenship to support the department and wider discipline.
• To engage in continuing professional development by participation in the undergraduate or postgraduate teaching programmes or by membership of departmental committees, etc. and by attending relevant training and development courses.   
• To participate in project team meetings and workshops in the UK and India.

This post is fixed term for 29 months, or until 12 February 2028, whichever is sooner; funding is available for this fixed research period only.