Recruitment of one PhD student and two postdocs to the Department of Animal Breeding and Genetics

Animals are social beings who spend a majority of their lifetime engaged in various interactions with conspecifics. These social interactions are often the most important part of the environment that individuals experience, nevertheless we know very little about these interactions. The development of digital techniques gives us now opportunities to study those social interactions. In this research project you will work with data on dairy cattle, obtained from sensors and milking robots, in order to quantify social interactions. The social interaction also affects the spread of disease and possibilities for breeding, which are two important aspects of the project.

In this project, we aim to improve both animal welfare and animal production by focusing on improvement of the social environment of animals.

The work is part of the cooperative project 'Precision livestock breeding – improving both health and production in dairy cattle' of, besides SLU, Växa Sverige, University of Copenhagen, Dalarna University and RISE. The project is funded by FORMAS and by the Kjell & Märta Beijer Foundation. 

As a PhD student or postdoc you will collaborate with the Beijer Laboratory for Animal Sciences. The research at the Beijer Laboratory for Animal Science aims to make better use of data automatically collected at high-tech farms so that management and breeding of future generations of dairy cows may be as efficient as possible. As a Beijer Laboratory PhD student or postdoc you will have access to a large network of researchers, including those working in applied animal science as well as statistics, machine learning and artificial intelligence both at SLU and other universities.

We are looking for

• One PhD student (full time, 4 years) – read more and apply
• One postdoc with a background in data science (full time, 2 years) – read more and apply
• One postdoc with a background in biology (full time, 2 years) – read more and apply

Deadline for application: 23rd of March 2020

Applications can be only submitted via SLU:s online system