"Research Associate in services from flexible global supply chains"

Applicants are invited to apply for a post-doctoral Research Associate position as part of the project “System Services in 100% Renewable Grids.” The project is funded by the Leverhulme Professorship held by Professor Mark O’ Malley and aims to investigate services needed in 100% renewable electricity grids. One of the services needed is long duration storage (LDS) that is being investigated by the team. One specific solution to LDS is demand side flexibility of Global Supply Chains (GSCs) due to the energy volumes and the time constants involved (weeks/months and above) in contrast to classic demand flexibility of individual elements within the GSC that have much shorter time constants. This interdisciplinary work (Engineering and Economists within Imperial) is being carried out with partners at Texas A&M and Georgia Tech as part of an established collaboration.

How could GSCs enable LDS? While globalisation and offshoring have delivered substantial gains in productivity and welfare, recent disruptions have exposed vulnerabilities in the structure of GSCs. This has created a pressing need to understand how GSCs can be reconfigured to enhance resilience and support decarbonisation. The postholder will contribute to the development of a novel firm-level dataset covering international and domestic production linkages—both internal to firms and involving external suppliers—by combining administrative, confidential, and privately sourced data. This will support empirical analysis of the relationship between industrial electricity consumption, emissions, supply chain design, economic adjustment and electricity grids.

The immediate Leverhulme team currently includes Professor Mark O'Malley (Leverhulme Professor), Dr Elina Spyrou (Leverhulme Lecturer), Professor Janusz Bialek (a part-time Principal Research Fellow), two post-doctoral Research Associates, four pre-doctoral Research Assistants, and four PhD students. The larger project team in the UK consists of about 40 staff and students at Imperial as part of the Global Centres in Electric Power Innovation for a Carbon-free Society (EPICS). EPICS globally currently has a team of around 60 people. The team has a diverse range of skills and this post will be focussed on GSC flexibility for the provision of LDS in a collaboration between Electrical Engineering and Economics. Imperial’s Economics and Public Policy department has leading expertise in energy and trade economics, including Dr Mirabelle Muûls, Professor Richard Green, Professor Ralf Martin and Dr Esther Böler.

The research direction of EPICS is aligned to the Global Power System Transformation (G-PST) initiative and its Research Agenda.

What you would be doing:

• Plan research and direct the work of small research teams.
• Assist in the supervision of undergraduate and postgraduate research students and Research Assistants.
• Identify and develop suitable techniques to address research questions, managing data, applying data quality procedures.
• Write reports for submission to research sponsors, presenting research findings to colleagues at conferences.
• Publish in high-quality refereed journals and participate in attracting additional research funding.
• Conduct and plan your own scientific work with minimal supervision.
• Be based at Imperial, collaborate closely with colleagues at Imperial and in the G-PST consortium.
• Visit collaborators in the G-PST consortium, attending relevant workshops and conferences, developing and pursuing collaborations within Imperial and with the wider community.