Institute of Astronomy

Fixed-term: The funds for this post are available for 5 years in the first instance. If additional funding is acquired, extension may be possible.

The Institute of Astronomy (IoA) and the co-located, interdepartmental Kavli Institute for Cosmology, Cambridge (KICC) at Cambridge University are internationally renowned for a uniquely stimulating and multi-disciplinary research environment. One topic where Cambridge has a long history is black holes, the most extreme environments in nature, and laboratories where strong gravity, plasma physics and high-energy astro(particle)/physical processes meet. The research group of Prof. Sera Markoff (Plumian Professor) studies these systems across the full black hole mass scale, combining GPU-accelerated supercomputer simulations and semi-analytic modelling with data from world-leading facilities including the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). Her group sits at the nexus of several international efforts: a growing Cambridge node, where this post is based (currently expanding over the coming years into a fully-fledged team of students and postdocs); an established group at the University of Amsterdam of several postdocs and students; her ongoing ERC Synergy Grant project 'Blackholistic', with partner groups at Oxford, Radboud University in Nijmegen, the University of Turku, the University of Namibia and the University of South Africa; and major international collaborations including the EHT and the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO). Via the ERC project, the group is also involved in commissioning a new 14-metre radio telescope in Namibia, the Africa Millimetre Telescope.

The group's research is built on a developing portfolio of in-house software: a GPU-accelerated general-relativistic magnetohydrodynamics (GRMHD) simulation code (in C, with GPU acceleration primarily on NVIDIA and AMD hardware); a GR ray-tracing code (in Julia) that produces images and spectra from those simulations, and is designed to conduct Bayesian parameter inference; semi-analytic jet and accretion modelling codes (in C++, with a Python interface) that are being integrated into the open-source Gammapy framework for use across the CTAO community and beyond; and increasingly building on other imaging and analysis frameworks used within the EHT Collaboration. These codes run on local, national and international high-performance computing (HPC) facilities.

https://www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/research-software-engineer-part-time-fixed-term-lg50949