Research Assistant

A key component of an effective biodiversity strategy is rapid and scalable monitoring. At the institutional level, Eawag and WSL have extensive expertise and experience in novel biodiversity monitoring approaches. In a coordinated development, the novel Biodiversity Monitoring (BiMo) initiative aims to strengthen this research portfolio and generate effective practice implementation. The project has a strong focus on method development and outputs with high relevance for stakeholders. Together with two other projects on remote sensing and eDNA, the BiMo initiative will strengthen capacities at Eawag and WSL for developing and implementing biodiversity monitoring methods. In this project , you will establish an imaging database of benthic invertebrate specimens from freshwater ecosystems. Benthic invertebrates are a central component of freshwater ecosystems, but the morphological variation and taxonomic complexity hinder high-throughput monitoring of taxonomic and functional diversity. The imaging database will be built up from multiple sources, including new images taken from museum-curated samples and existing images from global repositories and private research collections. The database will then be used to train robust AI tools for identifying taxa and generating size distribution estimates for populations and communities. This project builds on previous workflows developed for image acquisition and organism segmentation and will be developed further for taxonomic classification and size quantification. We are looking for  a motivated candidate with some taxonomic expertise in macrozoobenthos in general, and important groups such as Ephemeroptera, Plecoptera, and Trichoptera in particular. Images will be acquired from 1000s of specimens, and then organized and analyzed using custom Python scripts. Some field work will also be involved to join teams of re-searchers that are collecting specimens from Swiss lakes. The successful candidate holds a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Ecology, Evolutionary Biology, or Biodiversity Sciences or a closely related science field. You have some taxonomic expertise for macrozoobenthos and zooplankton. You can do field work in Swiss alpine settings, and, ideally, have experience in the use of scripting languages (e.g., Python, R), data management, and machine learning. The working language in the groups is English. Fluency in speaking and writing is required. The project is led by Dr Blake Matthews (Eawag/UZH), and Dr Philipp Brun (WSL), in collaboration with Dr Francesco Pomati (Eawag), Dr Catherine Graham (WSL), Dr Moritz Luerig , and Dr Marco Baity-Jesi (Eawag). This position will be based in the group of Dr Blake Matthews () at Eawag (Kastanienbaum, Kanton Luzern, Switzerland). The position is fully funded for two years and is expected to start in Q1 of 2026.