Three (3) PhD Fellowships in beetle systematics & evolution, University of Copenhagen, Denmark (2015 - 2016)

The Biosystematics Department of the Natural History Museum of Denmark at the Faculty of Science, University of Copenhagen is offering 3 PhD scholarships at Alexey Solodovnikov research group to start in late spring 2015. All projects are part of the European Union Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network Program that funded BIG4 (‘Biosystematics, Informatics and Genomics of the 4 big insect groups’) international cross-disciplinary training consortium. When applying please choose between tree projects (specify in your application with project you want to work with, or list them in order of your priority).

Projects
Projects vary in scope and methods, but any of them involve combination of classical methods of systematics with innovative techniques and approaches. All three projects involve travels and field work, they are as follows:

1. Integrating fossils and recent taxa in the study of rove beetle evolution and systematics (co-advised by F. Ronquist, Swedish Museum of Natural History, Stockholm).
The main objective is to critically examine some described and new key Mesozoic fossils of Staphylinidae, integrate them in the existing phylogenetic datasets, merge the latter as far as possible, and perform the total evidence dated phylogenetic analysis targeting basal relationships within this mega-diverse beetle family.

2. Aleocharinae rove beetles of New Zealand: development of the accelerated workflow to study “dark taxa” in poorly known biodiversity hotspots (co-advised by R. Leschen, New Zealand Arthropod collection, Auckland; and M. Fikáček, Charles University).
The objective is to perform a generic revision and an overview of the extremely poorly known aleocharine fauna of New Zealand. The project also targets development of a more efficient workflow that would involve molecular phylogenetics at the early stages of taxonomic exploration of a very species-rich group in a region with multiple unknown phylogenetic lineages.

3. Genomics-based approaches to the eco-systematic study of insect biodiversity from fragile, endangered ecosystems (co-advised by N. Wahlberg, Lund University; C. Reid, Australian Museum and G. Cassis, University of New South Wales, Sydney)

Further details:
http://ec.europa.eu