Up to eight more sustainability postdocs at Leuphana

By Joern Fischer

Leuphana has just advertised up to eight more postdoc positions in sustainability. These are associated with a new project called “Bridging the Great Divide“, run by Daniel Lang, Henrik von Wehrden and Klaus Kuemmerer (from Leuphana), as well as Arnim Wiek and Manfred Laubichler (from Arizona State University). Please help distribute these positions by sharing this blog post.

The detailed advertisements are on Leuphana’s website. You can find them here, but please note you may have to go to the second page (or even the third) to find the relevant advertisements. All the ones related to this blog post start with “… 13.07.2016 … in the pro­ject Bridging the Gre­at Di­vi­de“.

As an entry, here is the project abstract for “Bridging the Great Divide”:

Sustaina­bi­li­ty chal­len­ges threa­ten the long-term via­bi­li­ty and in­te­gri­ty of so­cie­ties around the world. Whi­le the theo­re­ti­cal un­der­stan­ding of the­se chal­len­ges con­ti­nues to grow, so­lu­ti­ons are far less de­ve­l­o­ped. In re­s­pon­se, sustaina­bi­li­ty sci­ence has been de­ve­lo­ping a re­se­arch agen­da that fo­cu­ses on evi­dence-ba­sed so­lu­ti­ons that are scalable and trans­fe­ra­ble. Yet, the­re is still a si­gni­fi­cant gap bet­ween un­der­stan­ding com­plex chal­len­ges and cont­ri­bu­ting to con­text spe­ci­fic so­lu­ti­ons. This pro­ject aims to build ad­di­tio­nal ca­pa­ci­ty at Leu­pha­na Uni­ver­si­ty of Lüne­burg to bridge the di­vi­de bet­ween (i.) mo­de­ling and un­der­stan­ding of com­plex sustaina­bi­li­ty pro­blems (of­ten on a glo­bal sca­le), and (ii.) de­ve­lo­ping and eva­lua­ting con­textua­li­zed so­lu­ti­on ef­forts (of­ten on a lo­cal sca­le). Fo­cu­sing on spe­ci­fic to­pics (wa­ter, land-use, and cli­ma­te chan­ge chal­len­ges in­clu­ding mo­bi­li­ty), this pro­ject aims at com­bi­ning two pro­mi­nent ap­proa­ches: high-per­for­mance com­pu­ta­tio­nal mo­de­ling and tran­si­ti­on ex­pe­ri­ments. Com­bi­ning the­se two ap­proa­ches and sup­porting in­ter­di­sci­pli­na­ry col­la­bo­ra­ti­on across the re­la­ted aca­de­mic com­mu­nities whi­le buil­ding on di­sci­pli­na­ry ex­cel­lence de­fi­nes the agen­da for a fu­ture clus­ter of ex­cel­lence, for which a pro­po­sal shall be de­ve­l­o­ped as part of the pro­ject. This will also be a ma­jor leap towards bridging the know­ledge-ac­tion gap in sustaina­bi­li­ty sci­ence. Three spe­ci­fic com­po­n­ents of the pro­ject bey­ond the two ap­proa­ches are (i) the es­ta­blish­ment of a “Mo­bi­le So­lu­ti­on Thea­ter” as a fur­ther de­ve­lop­ment of exis­ting De­ci­si­on Thea­ter Con­cepts, to fa­ci­li­ta­te lin­king tran­si­ti­on ex­pe­ri­ments with high per­for­mance com­pu­ta­tio­nal mo­de­ling; (ii) fur­ther de­ve­lop­ment of in­no­va­ti­ve, re­se­arch ba­sed teaching-learning en­vi­ron­ments em­bed­ded in the over­all set­up of the pro­ject and (iii) a cri­ti­cal re­flec­tion of the epis­te­mo­lo­gi­cal foun­da­ti­ons of sustaina­bi­li­ty sci­ence as well as the spe­ci­fic ap­proa­ches uti­li­zed in this pro­ject.

Please address all questions to the people running this project; you can find contact details here.