PRR Project

Summary

We propose hiring an Adjunct Professor in Physics/Geophysics with Seismology and Wave Physics expertise. He/she will be integrated as a professor in the Physics Department (DF) (https://www.isel.pt/departamento/fisica) of ISEL and as a researcher at IDL as part of the Research Group Solid Earth Dynamics (https://idl.ciencias.ulisboa.pt). The successful candidate is expected to collaborate with the overall strategy of investigating the solid Earth´s physical structure and dynamics and associated phenomena by strengthening knowledge of new seismic data acquisition and processing algorithms required by the big data associated with the latest technological developments. He/she is expected to develop new methodologies for inversion and modelling, allowing to obtain fast multi-scale high-resolution imaging of the shallow Earth´s structure using large seismic data sets, which will contribute to the exploration and exploitation of natural resources and monitoring, assisting the most recent societal and industry demands for preserving a sustainable environment. He/she is expected to be able to undertake innovative, independent, and collaborative research and make proof of having the necessary initiative to promote professional and community links and explore the scope for interdisciplinary collaboration within and beyond academia taking advantage of the ISEL engineering opportunities. He/she is expected to secure competitive national and international projects and attract graduated students and young researchers. Therefore, the new employee should play an active role in career planning for early-career scientific staff and take responsibility for educating undergraduate and graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in collaboration with IDL. This will result in high-quality outputs, including publications in peer-reviewed scientific literature, and communications at leading national and international conferences and seminars that will contribute to the scientific achievements of both DF/ISEL and IDL. As part of his lecturing duties, he/she should be able to provide high-quality and engaging teaching across the portfolio of courses offered by the DF/ISEL. An ability and willingness to be involved in lab-based education and establish industry partnerships would also be desirable.We require a candidate with a Geophysics/Physics background, a PhD in Geophysics/Physics, and postdoctoral experience. We are particularly interested in applicants with a strong seismology and wave physics background, able to model the Earth’s subsurface physical parameters and related phenomena, demonstrated by a strong publication track record in international peer-reviewed indexed journals with high impact in this research field. We also seek a candidate with expertise in acquiring, processing, and interpreting massive amounts of seismic data and have the necessary skills to develop and use High-Performance Computing tools to implement well-established seismic techniques, including, but not limited to, seismic tomography, anisotropy, or waveform inversions. Experience leading research projects and supervising MSc and PhD students will also be valued.The Geophysics group has been established at DF/ISEL for over 25 years. The group has a strong physics background, with most of its members studying the solid Earth. The DF/ISEL is currently seeking to expand its research activities, also in connection with our new 1st-cycle degree program in Applied Physical Engineering (LEFA), which has the potential to attract students interested in pursuing academic research. We also aim to strengthen our ties with the IDL, which includes a research group in  Solid Earth Dynamics, already involving six staff members of DF. The new generation of scientific equipment, new tools, and existing new data to continuously monitor the Earth’s seismic vibrations are key advancements to improve the resolution of images of the Earth significantly. Another critical innovation comes with the permanent Earth’s background seismic vibrations, which repeatedly sample the shallow Earth. This is particularly relevant for short-term monitoring, where often short-term deployments are not long enough for natural sources to occur. In seismology, the volumes of data being acquired from individual experiments are now reaching hundreds of terabytes in passive seismology and petabytes in exploration seismology. Handling those large amounts of data is challenging and requires a solid geophysics background and good computational skills. The new hire would: (i) bring new skills, thereby enhancing our (ISEL and IDL) ability to tackle a broader range of problems and thus boost our research output; (ii) help consolidate physics of the earth studies and computational methods, which at present relies largely on temporary staff; (iii) help to recruit junior researchers and attract competitive funding.