The Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) with its 1,100 employees has gained an excellent reputation as an international competence centre for environmental sciences. We are part of the largest scientific organisation in Germany, the Helmholtz association. Our mission: Our research seeks to find a balance between social development and the long-term protection of our natural resources.
The jobHydrogen will play a key role in decarboninzing our society and sustain our future. Biophotovoltaics (BPV), which exploits the natural oxygen photosystem in a bioelectrochemcial system, aims to dilver a sustainble solution for hydrogen production in the future. It provides unique benefits in terms of the energy and resource deminds and also it can potentially make H2 production as a carbon-sink process as the oxygentic photomicroorganism (e.g. cyanobacteria) use CO2 as the carbon source for growth and maintainance. Within the newly BMBF funded Nachwuchsgruppenprojekt BioPV4H2 , we aim to gain a holistic understanding the BPV process from both biological and technological aspects, and thus to promote rational design and development of this technique for future application. To realize the proposed ambitious goals, I am seeking an enthusiastic student to fill a PhD position funded by this project. The main task of this position is to measure and model the process kinetics on the process interfaces (mainly light-microbe, and mediator-electrode), and rationally engineer and optimize the process configuration and parameters. The successfully candidate will be supervised by a team with leading expertise in multiple disciplines, and have the support for skill trainings externally and networking in national and international conferences.
Your tasksThe successful candidate is expected to have a good sense of numeric data, and will be supervised and supported by an interdisciplinary team at UFZ Leipzig and MPI-Magdeburg. With all these support, you are expected to complete the following tasks: