LOFAR related postdocs at CEA Saclay (near Paris)

Another job advert for two postdoc positions at CEA Saclay near Paris working on detection of radio transients - including for the LOFAR Transient Key Project.

AAS Job Register posting (copied below).

Applications are invited for two postdoctoral positions in signal processing/data analysis for an initial period of 2 years, with the UnivEarthsS LabEx program.

The astrophysics division of CEA Saclay is offering two positions to work with Professor Stéphane Corbel on radio transients in close collaboration with Jean-Luc Starck. Over the next decade, a combination of increased sensitivity, larger field of view, and algorithmic developments will open up the time domain to a wide range of astronomical fields, from stellar flares and supernovae to neutron-star and black-hole births, quakes and instabilities. Radio astronomy is leading this effort and transient science is identified as a key goal for LOFAR (Europe), ASKAP (Autralia) and MeerKAT (South Africa), the precursor instruments of the major international SKA facility to be developed for 2020+.

The applicant will work in one of these related topics:
  -Transient search in one of the affiliated key projects: TKP (LOFAR), ThunderKAT (MeerKAT), VAST (ASKAP),
  - Optimization of current methods and development of near real-time detection pipelines,
  - Characterization of transients and identification at other wavelengths,
  - Image reconstruction from undersampled Fourier measurements.

Minimum qualifications include an undergraduate degree or higher in astronomy, physics, computer science, statistics or related field. The candidate must have a strong motivation in developing statistical methods and applying them in large international projects. CEA Saclay ( http://irfu.cea.fr/Sap/en/ ) is located 25km south of Paris, near Universities and other research centers. The astrophysics division gathers more than 150 faculty and staff members, studying a large range of astrophysical problems.

The positions are initially for two years and the starting dates should be between early Fall 2011 and early 2012. Ample funding for conferences, collaborations, personal equipment and publication is available. Applicants should submit by email resume, bibliography and a brief research plans to Stéphane Corbel (stephane.corbel@cea.fr) and Jean-Luc Starck (jstarck@cea.fr) and arrange for three reference letters to be sent as well before 31 August 2011.
 

Postdoc position in LOFAR long-baseline development and implementation (Bonn)

Another LOFAR related postdoc position advertised this week - this one in Bonn. Text below taken direct from the job advert.

Postdoc position in LOFAR long-baseline development and implementation (Bonn)

LOFAR www.lofar.org is an innovative, low-frequency, multi-station aperture array telescope that is using new technologies and novel software approaches. LOFAR has entered its commissioning phase and started producing unique data in the relatively unexplored spectral window below 200 MHz.

The Argelander-Institute for Astronomy at the University of Bonn is offering a (max.) three-year postdoc/software developer position for long-baseline calibration development and implementation to start as soon as possible. The international baselines of LOFAR require special calibration schemes that are not fully included in the general calibration pipeline, yet. Sophisticated fringe-fitting methods that take into account the special polarisation properties of the system have to be developed for this purpose. Current algorithms have to be extended and added to the calibration pipeline.
Long-baseline commissioning is continuously making progress,

see ;http://arxiv.org/abs/1008.4358; http://www.astro.uni-bonn.de/~wucknitz/wiki/doku.php/lbg:start

Contributing to these efforts will be part of the project. Despite the emphasis of technical development work, unique science projects will be possible as well. Particularly the long baselines of LOFAR are probing an entirely new parameter space with many important discoveries to be expected. LOFAR has already improved the resolution of low-frequency VLBI imaging by an order of magnitude. Appointees are expected to spend 50% of their time on astronomical research (which would preferably be related to LOFAR) and 50% on development work.

Relevant qualifications are experience in radio interferometry beyond the bare user level, particularly on very long baselines, a mathematical understanding of the methods involved, and programming expertise. This experience should generally be proven by a PhD in astronomy, physics or another relevant field, even though a Master's degree may be sufficient in particular cases. The ability to work independently but in cooperation with an international team of astronomers and developers, as well as excellent communication skills and a good command of the English language are essential.

Applications (preferably by email) should include a CV, a statement of interests and experience, the prefered starting date, and three letters of reference. Applicants of any nationality are eligible to apply. The University of Bonn is an equal opportunities employer. Deadline for full consideration is 15 October 2011. Applications may still be accepted until the position is filled.

The remuneration is based on a public pay scale (generally TV-L/E13) and subject to age and experience. Comprehensive benefits include paid vacation, sick leave, parental leave, and social security benefits (contributions to unemployment and health insurance as well as retirement scheme).

This project is part of wider LOFAR efforts by a consortium of astronomical institutes in Germany. Positions in other fields (to be announced on the AAS job register in September) are available as well. Applicants who would like to have their application considered also for other locations should state this in the cover letter.

More information is available on request.

Dr. Olaf Wucknitz
Argelander-Institute for Astronomy
Auf dem Huegel 71
53121 Bonn
Germany

email: wucknitz@astro.uni-bonn.de
http://www.astro.uni-bonn.de/~wucknitz/

LOFAR related Postdoc Position at ICG, Portsmouth

The University of Portsmouth's Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation (ICG) is advertising a postdoctoral position for

Development of software to incorporate the international baselines of the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) into the LOFAR core array pipeline and data reduction framework. 

For more details see the job advert.

LOFAR Related PhDs at Southampton University

There are two PhD positions are available to work on LOFAR related science at the University of Southampton. Below is the advert from Southampton. 


Cosmological Radio Transients: Novel Techniques and Optical Counterparts


- Prof Rob Fender (http://www.astro.soton.ac.uk/~rpf)

Two PhD positions are available to work in the newly-formed '4 PI SKY' team at Southampton, led by Professor Fender and funded by a 3 million Euro EC grant. The goal of the team is to coordinate and advance global efforts for the discovery, identification and understanding of cosmological radio bursts. These bursts are associated with diverse extreme astrophysical phenomena such as merging neutron stars, accreting black holes and supernovae. With these programs we hope to perform a real-time census of particle acceleration in the local universe, understand the growth of black holes on cosmological timescales, probe the nature of the distant intergalactic medium for the first time, and - just maybe - detect electromagnetic counterparts to the first-detected gravitational wave sources.

Professor Fender is joint project leader of radio transients programs on both LOFAR (www.lofar.org) and MeerKAT (www.ska.ac.za), two revolutionary new radio telescopes. The PhD projects available are (i) to work, in partnership with the Oxford University Transient Universe Studies group (OTUS), to develop novel techniques for the detection of transient events in the vast streams of data that will be produced by telescopes such as LOFAR and MeerKAT, and (ii) to work on the follow-up and classification programs for the optical counterparts of detected radio transients - only with these data will we be able to understand the physics behind the bursts that we detect.

Both of these projects will involve close collaboration with, and visits to, other collaborating groups in places such as Amsterdam, Cape Town and Sydney. The projects are funded for 4 years each and are open to applicants from across the EC. 


For more details on the group, and how to apply for the studentships,
please go to:

http://www.astro.soton.ac.uk/postgrad.html

Another LOFAR Related PhD Project

Another LOFAR related PhD project - this one at Queen Mary London, in Space and Solar Plasma Physics check out the advert, reposted below.

PhD project in Space and Solar Plasma Physics Queen Mary, University of London

Applications are invited for a SEPnet funded (South-East Physics network, http://www.sepnet.ac.uk/) PhD Studentship within the Astronomy Unit, School of Mathematical Sciences, Queen Mary University of London (QMUL).

The project is related to exciting, major unsolved problems of solar physics such as coronal heating and solar flare dynamics. Type III radio bursts are believed to come from solar flare electrons that travel upwards, away from the Sun, on open magnetic field lines. The proposed work aims to fill the gap in understanding how the upwards moving electrons are accelerated and produce the observed radio emission. This will be achieved through kinetic-scale modelling of the phenomenon and numerical simulation results will be compared with radio and other wavelength observations. The project benefits from access to large-scale parallel 1000 core processor cluster via UKMHD consortium, while the radio data will be available via participation of QMUL in LOFAR-UK and SEPnet Astro consortia (http://astro.kent.ac.uk/SEPNET/). The LOw Frequency ARray, LOFAR (http://www.lofar-uk.org/), is a next-generation software-driven telescope currently under construction in the Netherlands and UK.

Dr David Tsiklauri, Senior Lecturer at Astronomy Unit, QMUL will be the PhD project supervisor, while Dr Aris Karastergiou, Astrophysics, Oxford University, will act in a co-supervisory capacity.

Applicants should have a good Honours degree in Physics or Applied Mathematics (at least 2:1 or equivalent) or a lower second class plus a Master’s (MPhys) qualification. Programming experience in any high level language is highly desirable.

Candidates will receive full fees and tax free stipend of circa £13,000 per annum for three years.

Candidates should send their CV and names (with contact details) of two referees by Email to: D.Tsiklauri@ qmul.ac.uk

The applications should be submitted as soon as possible, but no later than 15 January 2010.

Starting date will be soon after the deadline and is negotiable.

For further information, please visit URL links below:

Dr David Tsiklauri’s webpage http://www.maths. qmul.ac.uk/ ~tsiklauri/

Astronomy Unit http://www.maths. qmul.ac.uk/ Astronomy/

Queen Mary University of London http://www.qmul. ac.uk/

Funding Notes:

In addition to UK and EU students, non-UK or non-EU ones (worldwide) are also eligible to receive tuition fee waiver and a full stipend

LOFAR Related PhD Project

Courtesy of the RAS Job List - a PhD project related to LOFAR.

Large-scale structure from the next generation of radio surveys.

University of Sussex Astronomy Centre
Supervisor: Dr. Ilian Iliev (Sussex)
Co-supervisors: Prof. Steven Rawlings (Oxford) and Prof. Robert Nichol(Portsmouth)

Funding is available for 3 years for suitably qualified candidates, at a level of 12,940 GBP/year. Fees are fully covered for UK/EU students (and in some cases may be covered for international students) and travel funding is also available.

This PhD project will address a host of important questions related to the formation and evolution of the large-scale cosmic structures. The main topics are studying the nature of the Dark Energy component which dominates today's universe through precise measurements of the Baryonic Acoustic Oscillations and evaluating the effects of possible primordial non-Gaussianity of the initial perturbations on the large-scale structures. Both objectives will be achieved through performing and studying N-body structure formation simulations which will be among the largest ever performed, with tens to hundreds of billions of particles. These results will then be compared to data from large galaxy surveys, in particular the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), the HETDEX survey and radio surveys with LOFAR. More specifically, we will simulate the LOFAR million-source survey and SDSS-3, producing mock catalogues of both galaxies and radio sources. We will use the halo model and semi-analytical galaxy formation modelling to implement galaxies and sub-structure and their evolution. The high dynamic range of these simulations will improve the statistics and allow us to connect most radio sources to individual galaxies. It will also yield a better treatment of the nonlinear source clustering and scale-dependent bias. The key objectives are to produce detailed source catalogues and radio maps to be used for understanding the survey results and design improvements for future instruments like the Square Kilometer Array. This will allow us to extract much more precise values for the basic cosmological parameters from the data and gain better understanding of the nature of Dark Energy, one of the largest mysteries in present-day science.

For more information/to apply for this project, please contact Dr. Ilian Iliev (email: I.T.Iliev [AT] sussex.ac.uk).