If you would like to join us for a short research visit to collaborate on various projects where our expertise maybe useful to you, please contact me with a CV, a well-defined research proposal and specific goals for your visit, a list of funding agencies that will support you, and some suggested dates. Requests to support visiting applications need to be made months in advance to the application deadline, for our HR office to be able to support them and help in the application for pertinent visas. Potential visiting scholars from developing countries are encouraged to apply for a Darwin Fellowship to come work in my team for up to 14 months. More information here.
Join Us
NOTE: If you want to apply for a Marie Skłodowska-Curie action to join the SalGo Team (Next deadline projected for Sept), please contact me before the end of May. Please note that this type of highly competitive fellowships require a significant effort/amount of time by both the applicant and the host to be successful.
NOTE: If you want to apply for a Royal Society Newton International Fellowship to join us (Call not yet open, forecast deadline late 2025) please contact me ASAP with a short description of the type of research you'd like to conduct in my group and your CV.
Postdoc positions currently available:
None available at the moment, but happy to discuss research opportunities. See below under "Postdoctoral Researchers & Fellows"
MBiol projects:
We typically accept 1-3 Y4 MBiol students per year. Scroll down to "MBiol/MSc" to learn more about the projects we offer.
RA positions currently available:
We are seeking a motivated intern to benchmark state-of-the-art deep-learning architectures for semantic segmentation of 3-D LiDAR point clouds, using our fully labelled dataset to isolate lianas from surrounding vegetation; working on an Alienware workstation with a recent RTX-class GPU, you will preprocess and augment data, fine-tune multiple reference models (PointNeXt, Point Transformer V3, KPConv, SPVCNN, PointNet++), evaluate them with metrics such as mIoU and F1, compare accuracy, speed and memory footprint, and deliver a concise, reproducible report—including code, trained weights and an optional lightweight ensemble—for future field deployment.
PhD positions currently available:
- Integrating resilience of natural systems from individuals to communities
- Plants on the move - NERC DTP-funded in collaboration with St Andrews Botanical Garden
- The demography of small things - NERC DTP-funded in collaboration with IoS Wildlife Trust
- Seedbanks as drivers of maladaptation to human disturbances under climate change - NERC DTP-funded in collaboration with Estación Biológica de Donana
If you are a quantitatively driven mind with interests in some of the following topics, please contact me to discuss potential undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral opportunities in my group:
- Life history evolution
- Resilience
- Evolution of (and escape from) senescence
- Plant and animal eco-evolutionary dynamics and demography
- Comparative biology and comparative demography
- Drivers of odd life history strategies such as (but not limited to) corals, flatworms, carnivorous plants, and parasitic plants
- Species distribution modelling and biogeography
- Population forecasting
- Technologies for ecological monitoring
In addition to several PhD and postdoc opportunities that will be periodically advertised below, if you have a project in mind that you would like to develop in my group, please contact me with a (1) brief project proposal, (2) CV, including publications, and (3) a list of funding themes that you are considering for this project (e.g. NERC/BBSRC DTP, Marie Curie, Leverhulme Trust, NERC, etc). You may also find some funding schemes that are specific to each of the academic levels below, which can be supplemented with these ones.
If you would like to expand your research expertise through further specialised training in my research team, please explore first the postdoctoral fellowship calls that Oxford Biology supports (Excel file below) and also complement that search with these links to ECR funding opportunities and postdoctoral fellowships. Then contact me with:
- A CV and pertinent publications
- A brief summary of the research ideas you’d like to explore together
- A list of fellowships that you are eligible for, including the deadlines when you’d like to apply for.
I do not support prospective applicants who contact me less than two months to the deadline for submission a targetted fellowship. In the case of the Marie Curie fellowship -which requires a serious effort on both the side of the candidate and my own- the prospective candidate must contact me by May 15th of the year of intended submission (with deadline usually in Sept-Oct).
In addition to the fellowships that we support (see here), you might want to suggest some fellowship calls from your home/continent/embassy for which you are eligible, and also pertinent ones from this online global resource.
If you would like to carry out your doctoral studies in my team, please contact me describing briefly:
- The overarching question you would like to research in my lab.
- Three hypotheses that you would like to test during your DPhil (PhD) in the context of your overarching question. Think of each hypothesis as a separate DPhil chapter/manuscript.
- The study system(s) you would like to use and why, available data, and proposed methodologies.
- The funding bodies that you are eligible for and are pertinent to the proposed research (More below)
- Attach your CV and pertinent publications.
Please contact me well ahead of the January annual application deadline (See here to discuss your ideas, feasibility and funding). Funding to do your PhD at Oxford can be obtained through a series of external or internal and highly competitive* fellowships. Most of the internal support is eligible only for UK and EU citizens, with the exception of funds like Natural Motion or Clarendon. You are also welcome to explore other funds such as the Rhodes Foundation, Commonwealth or scholarships from your own alma mater/state/country. The easiest way for an effective exploration of your opportunities with regards to external funding is to ask the graduate office at your undergraduate university, other potential contacts from your country who might have come to Oxford, or even your embassy/consulate. Oftentimes, private foundations and philatrophic entities offer fantastic sources of support for PhD tuitions and more, but these are not very well advertised, so you may want to consider spending some time doing your homework online… This is something that takes time, careful planning, and cannot be left for the last minute.
*For most of these, having a peer-review publication under your belt will make you more competitive.
This website explains the various ways to come to carry out your DPhil at Oxford Biology.
In addition, if you are interested in the application of AI technologies to solve environmental challenges, check out the newly founded IntelligentEarth Centre for Doctoral Training. Further Oxford fellowship opportunities here.
Oxford Biology offers a four-year integrative MBiol programme, where the last year is a research-intensive one, which results in the completion of a written thesis and a viva. The Salgo Team accepts 1-3 MBiol students per year. If you are interested in discussing potential projects, you can either take a look at our research themes and what the group has produced recently, and contact me with some ideas of yours, or you can explore the following projects that we are currently proposing:
- MBiol project: Leaf reflectance
- MBiol project: Luck and senescence
- MBiol project: Mistletoe bird vectors
- MBiol project: Remote sensing invasives
- MBiol project: Seed bank plasticity
- MBiol project: Seed dispersal
- MBiol project: Seed dynamics
- MBiol project: Tree architecture
If you have not done your undergraduate at Oxford Biology, please note that, while we cannot accept MSc students in Oxford Biology (More information here), we can accept MSc students from the Oxford School of Geography to carry out their research in our lab.
Oxford undergraduate students:
If you’d like to do a:
- Summer internship/project in my team and/or
- 2nd/3rd year written essay/oral presentation towards your degree
send me an email with three different days/times when you could join me in my office to discuss feasibility. For the summer internship/project, please contact your College in a first instance as well as other pertinent financial sources to support you economically during this experience. Oxford Biology does not support summer internships by undergraduate students who are not receiving at least the minimum Oxford wage.
Non Oxford-based undergraduate students:
If you’d like to do a summer project in my team, please contact me with a résumé and summary of your research interests, as well as summer availability. For projects longer than 1 week, the student must have secured external funding that will support the research experience (e.g. accommodation, food). You might want to look up also support opportunities at Oxford online, such as the NERC summer rep.
If you would like to do a short internship in my team, please contact me with:
- A résumé
- A summary of your research interests
- Your availability
For internships longer than 1 week, the student must have secured external funding that will support the research experience (e.g. accommodation, food) prior to joining us.
Mentoring Philosophy
My mentoring philosophy is based on three pillars, below, that I have built through the years having been exposed to the diverse teaching and mentoring styles of >10 institutions across 3 continents:
- Think first, do second: I care deeply about critical thinking and the carefully the evaluation of the validity of the hypotheses and theories that have been put forward since the origin of ecology and evolution. To that end, I encourage my mentees to challenge the assumptions of established theories. Through the years, I have found this teaching style to be most effective at equipping my students and postdocs with the ability to think critically and engaging them in big-picture questions in ecology and evolution.
- Independence: Members of my team who have recently joined meet rather frequently with me, and as time goes by, the frequency and duration of those formal meetings go down, as per the needs of the mentee and the project. However, I do have an open-door policy for informal discussions. Overall, I endeavour to instil a sense of ownership of the project and research independence in my team members. Students joining my team can opt to start with a project that I might have developed myself, but very much encouraged to come up with their own ideas. Regardless, members in my team are encouraged and adequately equipped to gain academic independence while remaining collaborative with members of the team and outside collaborators.
- Goal oriented projects: I am trained in project management. I use past training and extensive experience in leading international projects to mentor my students/postdocs in the adequate progress of their own projects. To that end, I develop tailor-made strategies for time management and project development that allow them to see projects through on time.
Students and postdocs who graduate from my research team do so on time, with multiple peer-review publications and grants under their belts, and well-equipped to develop thoughtful, independent, and big-picture science. PhD students from my group have gone on to obtain competitive fellowships incl. Marie Curie fellowship (EU), Smith fellowship (Intl), Juan de la Cierva fellowship (Spain). Similarly, postdocs who have worked with me have continued their professional development in competitive fellowships (e.g. Marie Curie, Ramon Areces (Spain)), and tenure-track positions. Candidates interested in joining the SalGo Team are welcome to get in contact with members of the lab to obtain learn about the research style and dynamics of the group.
