his position will be embedded in a lab whose focus is broadly the human impact of global change (e.g., climate, land-use and demographic change).

The post-doctoral research assistant will focus on a One Health, interdisciplinary research project set around anthropological, molecular and ecological data collection in The Gambia and Nigeria, with an international team of collaborators. We are interested in examining questions around how patterns of contact, result in similarities/differences in the pathogens people and animals share. To achieve this, we are conducting in-depth participatory social science evaluations of people’s everyday habits and activities, measuring proximity using movement analysis and activity space mapping, and combining this with in-depth ecological surveys. We will then undertake extensive metagenomic work to understand the composition of shared viral communities, and follow this up with targeted, longitudinal serological data collection.

The post-holder will lead on the quantitative analysis of molecular samples, using metagenomic machine learning pipelines to identify viruses and then build similarity networks from community samples. They will also act to support a project-based cohort of four PhD students, from across the four main disciplines in the project: social science, ecology, public health and microbiology.