Selection Procedures
Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the CAS announces an open competition in accordance with the Act No. 283/1992 Coll. on the Czech Academy of Sciences, and the Statutes of the Czech Academy of Sciences for a position Postdoctoral position in climate and health modelling.
The Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czechia, opens a postdoctoral fellow position in climate and health modelling.
The position is open for candidates who will hold their PhD title by April 30, 2022, and who received their PhD title within two years before that date, that is, not earlier than May 1, 2020.
The application is a two-stage process. In the first stage, the qualification of the applicants will be evaluated based on the provided documents; shortlisted candidates may then be invited for an interview (held by a videoconference). In the second stage, the most qualified applicant will be invited to apply for a fellowship awarded by the Czech Academy of Sciences.
The position is for the period of two years, starting from July 1, 2022 (postponement of the starting date may be negotiated). The gross monthly salary will be in the range of 35000 to 40000 Czech crowns (CZK).
We ask the interested persons to submit the following documents:
- cover letter providing the motivation for the application and explaining why the applicant considers herself/himself qualified for the position.
- curriculum vitae,
- list of publications and other relevant research outputs,
- PhD diploma or another certificate of a PhD degree (original official document with English translation)
- names and email addresses of two persons who can provide recommendation.
The application and supporting documentation to be used for the assessment must be in English.
The documents should be sent by email to Dr. Romana Beranová (rber@ufa.cas.cz). The deadline for sending the applications is March 31, 2022.
Research topic: The role of heat early warning systems to reduce heat-related mortality in Europe
Hand by hand with increasing frequency and intensity of heatwaves in Europe, heat early warning systems (HEWSs) have been implemented by local authorities (Casanueva et al. 2019). HEWSs are assumed to be an example of adaptation measures saving both human lives and costs. However, their beneficial effects are not consistent across cities and regions (de’Donato et al. 2015), which suggests a room for improvement of such systems in the methodology as well as in steps following the alert issuance (Pascal et al. 2021).
The goal of this project is better understanding of the ability of HEWSs to prevent heat-related mortality in Europe. Using the mortality dataset available from the MCC Collaborative Research Network and up to date catalogue of HEWSs in Europe collected within TG 3.11 of the COST Action PROCLIAS, we will analyse the association between spatial-temporal changes in heat-related mortality and implementation of HEWSs across Europe. Heat-mortality associations will be assessed using advanced statistical techniques including distributed lag non-linear models (Gasparrini and Leone 2014; Gasparrini et al. 2010) and mixed-effect meta-regression models (Sera et al. 2020).
The candidate should have a strong knowledge of statistical modelling and visualisation of time series data (in R/RStudio). The successful candidate will collaborate with Dr. Aleš Urban and Dr. Jan Kyselý from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics and will be involved in their international activities within the COST Action PROCLIAS and MCC.
References:
Casanueva A, Burgstall A, Kotlarski S, et al., 2019. Overview of existing heat-health warning systems in Europe. Int J Environ Res Public Health 16: 2657.
de’ Donato F, Leone M, Scortichini M, et al. 2015. Changes in the effect of heat on mortality in the last 20 years in nine European cities. Results from the PHASE project. Int J Environ Res Public Health 12:15567–15583.
Gasparrini A, Armstrong B, Kenward MG 2010. Distributed lag non-linear models. Stat Med 29 (21): 2224–2234.
Gasparrini A, Leone M 2014. Attributable risk from distributed lag models. BMC Med Res Methodol 14:55.
Pascal. M., Lagarrigue, R., Tabai, A. et al. 2021. Evolving heat waves characteristics challenge heat warning systems and prevention plans. Int J Biometeorol 65:1683–1694.
Sera F, Hashizume M, Honda Y, et al 2020. Air conditioning and heat-related mortality: A multi-country longitudinal study. Epidemiology 779–787.
Application deadline: 03/31/2022