The Department of Physics seeks to appoint a Research Fellow who will be part of the facility management team of the High-Field NMR National Research Facility (NRF) and provide support for external users to perform experiments and interpret the results. The primary responsibilities of this development role is to assist material science and chemistry users with no or limited previous experience in solid-state NMR. The NRF provides access to a 850 MHz wide bore and a 1 GHz narrow bore Bruker Neo spectrometer, with a 1.2 GHz system to be installed in 2025. The facility has a large variety of MAS probes including a 0.5 mm probe spinning up to 150 kHz, a DOR probe, a 7 mm LASER probe, and 0.7 mm, 1 mm, 1.3 mm, 1.6 mm, 1.9 mm, 2.5 mm, 3.2 mm, 4 mm and 7 mm probes, with a large variety of triple resonance combination, and extended variable temperature capabilities.

The UK High-Field Solid-State NMR Facility (warwick.ac.uk)

We will consider applications for employment on a part-time or other flexible working basis, even where a position is advertised as full-time, unless there are operational or other objective reasons why it is not possible to do so. 

The Department of Physics seeks to appoint a motivated and driven Research Fellow within the Astronomy and Astrophysics Group. The appointment will be for 3 full years and funding is immediately available for a start at the earliest convenience of the candidate, but must be before 1 February 2024. Applications for a part-time position will be considered.

The successful candidate will work with Dr David Armstrong and Dr Heather Cegla on the project “Investigating the nature and origins of planets in the Neptunian Desert” funded by the UK Frontier Research Grants (initially an ERC Starter Grant), with additional support from a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship on “A Pathway to the Confirmation and Characterisation of Habitable Alien Worlds.” The post can flexibly focus on a number of relevant topics in the exoplanet field, including transits, radial velocities, planetary internal structure and population studies, and will include some time dedicated to the effects of stellar activity in these areas, with all research targeted towards building an understanding of planets in and near the desert. The post is expected to primarily focus on observations and data modelling/analysis, although some theoretical aspects can be considered where relevant.

The project will rely on photometry and spectroscopy obtained at a range of ground and space-based telescopes (TESS, NGTS, CORALIE, HARPS, ESPRESSO), through both guaranteed time and future proposed time allocations. The successful applicant will be playing a key role in the analysis, modelling, and interpretation of these observations, as well as helping guide PhD students in their analysis. The overall goal of the project is to build an unbiased statistical understanding of the planet population in and around the desert, in terms of planet radius, density and internal structure. Several new, extremely dense Neptune-size planets have been found in the desert and their formation pathways are unknown. The research undertaken in this project will enable observational constraints to be placed on the evolution pathways of those planets, as well as planet formation more widely, by studying the extreme outcomes of the planet formation process.

We will consider applications for employment on a part-time or other flexible working basis, even where a position is advertised as full-time, unless there are operational or other objective reasons why it is not possible to do so. 

Applications from underrepresented minorities are particularly encouraged.