About the role

Research post applying systems thinking to food system resilience and vertical farming as part of the “Vertical Farming to Improve UK Food System Resilience (VF-UKFSR)” project. 

The role will involve building causal systems maps of the UK leafy green supply chain in workshops with partner farmers (both conventional horticulture and vertical farming) and from interviews and literature. Exploring how different potential risks to the supply chain might impact on it and the broader system and then working with farmers to understand how they might respond and adapt.

There is opportunity for work on novel ways to use systems maps to explore the impacts and interactions of risks and the resilience of complex food systems. Both with developing new network analysis tools and new participatory approaches to uncover and understand risks/vulnerabilities and to explore adaptation strategies. 

You will work closely with the interdisciplinary VF-Resilience team across multiple universities and with our farm partners, collaborating across the project to integrate systems approaches with socio-economic and land use modelling and work on social acceptance, and helping to form a roadmap to support policy and industry in understanding the future role of VF in the UK food system.

About you

You must be ambitious and able to work independently, as well as collaboratively, in a diverse and multidisciplinary team. Successful applicants should have, or will soon have, a doctoral degree in a relevant discipline, or commensurate professional experience, with evidence of strong interdisciplinary working and qualitative and quantitative skills or demonstrable capacity to develop them where there are gaps. 

You should have skills and enthusiasm for using systems thinking approaches and tools in real world challenges. The ideal candidate will have previous experience in systems thinking or complexity, and in participatory approaches, ideally in systems mapping or other types of participatory modelling. 

You must be able to work with stakeholders and have the ability to organize and maintain an ongoing participatory process and stakeholder relationships as well as to adapt the process to on-the-ground constraints. 

A strong interest in, and ideally experience of food systems and horticulture/agriculture coupled with an interest in resilience and risk analysis is required. 

Quantitative skills in network analysis, causal analysis, risk and resilience or related analysis skills, alongside the ability to code in R or Python, or a demonstrable ability to develop these are highly desirable. As well as sufficient understanding of quantitative and qualitative methods to develop novel map analysis useful to system stakeholders.

You must have sufficient cross-disciplinary understanding and experience to work collaboratively on bridging qualitative and quantitative models, methods and data with other researchers in order to support connections across the project team.

You should have experience in producing academic publications alongside research work and be able to organize your workload and time to do so.