Joining the lab

We are always looking for talented early-career scientists of all nationalities and backgrounds with a passion for ecology and data science. 

• If you have your own funding (e.g. via a PhD fellowship or something like an Emmy Noether or an ERC fellowship), this is great and I would be glad to discuss options for hosting you in our group.
• If we have any funding available, this will appear in our News section with information about how to apply. If you don't see any offers in this section, you can assume there are no positions that are currently open.
• If neither you nor we have funding available, please understand that it will be mainly your responsibility to develop a project that fits with the research interest of our group (see our section on research) and to obtain funding for your project. For a list of funding options, see e.g. the websites of Research In Germany or the DAAD. When making a plan for this, make sure to understand if attracting funding is realistic given your CV. For example, if you don't have any publications in ecology / data science, the chance to get a grant on these topics is pretty small. If you have doubts, you can also check by asking one of the large language models (e.g. Chat GTP or Claude) to read your CV, the profile of our research group, your project idea and the grant and give you feedback if your idea is realistic. In any case, when contacting me or a group leader in my group about such an application, please provide a concrete idea about the funding source.

Please understand due to German working regulations, that we cannot accept PhD / postdoc projects unless full funding is secured, even if you would offer to work for free. 

We are permanently looking for students with programming / statistical knowledge to help with programming / testing software that we develop, as well for data preparation and statistical analyses - if you are interested, please send a short (0.5 page max) explanation of your motivation, a CV that describes your experience in programming and data science, a transcripts of records of your studies and ideally examples of projects that you worked on (e.g. publications, GitHub repos, other software projects …) to our secretary (see here).  

This is usually always possible with sufficient interest / knowledge. For more details, please see our teaching section.

This is in principle possible (provided your prior education seems suitable), but we cannot support you with the organisation in terms of visa, travel, financing. For funding from Germany, see e.g. theDAAD (externer Link, öffnet neues Fenster), but there may be also funding from your home country. Also, you should look at our information about traineeships (externer Link, öffnet neues Fenster) at the UR and contact our welcome center to inquire about obtaining a trainee or student status during your stay. We can only host internships if your legal status (e.g. as an exchange student at the university) is clear.