We are looking for a Postdoctoral researcher to join the Sustainability in Biosystems Program team, based in Cabrils (Barcelona). We offer the opportunity to be part of an organization with a dynamic, collaborative work environment focused on professional development.
We invite applications from ambitious candidates with relevant research experience and passion to conduct research and innovation activities on crop systems modelling in the ERC-funded project ‘WILD-ROOTS’.

The main goal of the WILD-ROOTS project is to uncover how crop domestication has influenced belowground traits and processes, across a wide variety of crops and their wild relatives. This understanding will then be applied to enhance the drought resilience of agroecosystems. Our work integrates methods from soil ecology, plant ecophysiology, microbiology, and metabolomics. The candidate should have strong quantitative skills and experience with crop or agroecosystem models.





The main objective of the successful candidate will be to incorporate root and rhizosphere data into crop models to evaluate which beneficial belowground traits can be used to increase crop tolerance to drought in real world settings.

Head of the Program: Dr August Bonmatí.
Program’s key researcher/s for this position: Dr Catherine Preece.

Tasks and Responsibilities:
• To develop and apply mechanistic crop models to investigate how variation in belowground traits and processes influences crop growth and resilience under drought together with an interdisciplinary team of ecologists, plant physiologists and soil scientists.
• To develop and implement new model components where required, and parameterise, calibrate, and evaluate models using experimental datasets generated within WILD-ROOTS.
• To simulate crop performance under contrasting drought scenarios and explore the consequences of domestication-related variation in root traits.
• A collaborative research stay at Wageningen University & Research with the developers of the

📌 Postdoctoral Researcher in Crop Systems Modelling for the Sustainability in Biosystems Program (Cabrils)
🏢 Institut de Recerca i Tecnologia Agroalimentàries (IRTA)
📍 Cabrils