Openings at the Centre for ExoLife Sciences

Centre for ExoLife Sciences, CELS openend 5 new PhD fellowships and a postdoc position under the Novo Nordisk Synergy project “Effects of bacteria on atmospheres of Earth, Mars, and exoplanets”, during the fall of 2021 and one additional postdoc position during the spring of 2022. All these positions are now filled and/or in the process of being filled.

All the fellows, including the new postdoc, are expected to be working as a team in collaboration with the involved staff and other fellows in the project. The global aim of this interdisciplinary project is to advance our understanding of how life interacts with the environment on large scale and under various terrestrial and extraterrestrial conditions.

We will do this by sampling microorganisms from extreme locations on Earth, and through lab experiments expose them to a range of physical and chemical conditions. We then measure changes in their survival, growth and metabolism, analyze the exhaust gasses they emit, and study how the various organisms affect atmospheric composition and cloud formation.

Finally, we will incorporate the results into model atmospheres of exoplanets and quantify under which conditions they will leave traceable signatures in the observable exoplanet spectra.

The successful candidates are expected to have a flair for teamworking as well as a broad interest in the fields of biology, chemistry and physics surrounding fundamental aspects of astrobiology. In order to form a strong team that benefit from the synergy between the various fields, we seek fellows with a wide range of backgrounds within natural sciences.