This is a post within a project on modelling sea lice in farmed salmon. Sea lice are a pest of salmon that have the ability to evolve resistance to treatment with chemicals. Cooperation and best-practice agreements between farms exist to help make treatment as effective as possible and slow the evolution of resistence. Networks of both epidemiological spread via sea currents and social influence between managers come into play.

We have been combining mathematical and game theoretic modelling methods with expert knowledge of sea lice and the salmon industry to build a model of sea lice evolving resistance in a setting of multiple managers making decisions about how to treat. We have a work-in-progress Python model of sea lice epidmiology and genetics, and require a PDRA or software engineer to develop this model further and run computational modelling experiments, with the aim of producing outputs related to management of sea lice in particular as well as potentially more general methodological results on game theoretic epidemiology.

The direction of the work is somewhat flexible to the skills and interest of the candidate, and we will consider applicants with epidemiological, network science, game theoretic, or software development interests. Strong programming skills are key, with Python experience strongly preferred.