Research Assistant (Part Time) Coventry, England
Job description
This position is a part time, fixed term contract working 0.4 FTE until 31st March 2025
A Research Assistant is required at the Centre of Agroecology, Water and Resilience at Coventry University to work on a new UKRI funded project: Design and evaluation of peat-free blocking media.
The Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience (CAWR), which sits under the umbrella of RISER was established in 2014 and is driving innovative, internationally excellent research on the understanding and development of instability and resilience in water and food systems. Since its inception CAWR has been building a research team and has already grown to over 60 research staff, with 50+ PhD students.
This is an exciting opportunity to join one of Coventry University's flagship Research Centres, the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience and to work alongside colleagues passionate about transforming the World through impactful research.
The production of field vegetables and salad crops, which is highly dependent on transplanted seedlings that are grown in media that often contains peat. The mining of peat has adverse environmental consequences including the release of CO2, biodiversity loss and increased risk of flooding and is being phased out by the UK government. Commercial peat-free growing media have been developed, but whilst these are suitable for use in plastic modular trays they are not cohesive enough to produce the larger 'soil blocks' that are more widely used by growers for certain key crops. Furthermore, few organic solutions exist, despite this being a growing market sector. This project will therefore develop organic, peat-free growing media suitable for producing blocks that can be handled by existing machinery at both the plant nursery stage and during transplanting into the field. This new role will contribute to the project by assisting with field and glasshouse experiments, collecting data and providing general support, particularly with trial, laboratory and statistics work.
