Post-Doctoral Researcher: AquaUP - Aquafeed Upgraded (Specified Purpose Contract), School of Business, Maynooth University

Maynooth University is committed to a strategy in which the primary University goals of excellent research and scholarship and outstanding education are interlinked and equally valued. 

We are seeking a postdoctoral researcher to join the project “AquaUP - Aquafeed Upgraded: Enhancing Immune Function with Seaweed-modified Functional Compounds”, which is funded by the Marine Institute, Ireland and The EU under the Sustainable Blue Economy Partnership programme. We seek to appoint a postdoctoral researcher for an anticipated 17-month period, with the objective to support the Primary Investigator and the co-applicants in conducting Techno-economic assessment (TEA) to determine the economic viability, and bottlenecks, of a multiproduct biorefinery approach of producing seaweed bioactive at a commercial scale.

The focus of the postdoctoral researcher’s work will be predominantly (but not exclusively) on Work Package 6, which includes analysing the economic feasibility of the proposed processes (WP1-5) using the Techno-Economic Assessment (TEA). Outcomes will be assessed through a sensitivity analysis as well as a risk analysis (which will identify different favourable and non-favourable scenarios such as price variations in the market) to determine potential hot spots in the process which affect the feasibility of the technology and to determine if it is better to commercialize the process as a whole or in modules. The TEA will also provide the necessary information to compare the proposed process with current solutions from an economic perspective. The candidate will be part of the project’s multi country, multi university consortium and will have the opportunities to co-lead the development of deliverables and present project findings at international conferences. We are seeking a motivated candidate to strengthen our research group Eco-LOGIC (Economics for Healthy Society and Green Sustainable Communities) that researches within the Food-Environment-Health nexus from a social perspective to build a healthy and sustainable society.