GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel is a foundation under public law jointly financed by the Federal Republic of Germany (90%) and the State of Schleswig-Holstein (10%). It is one of the internationally leading institutions in the field of marine research.

Through our research and our commitment to the transfer of knowledge and technology, we contribute significantly to the preservation of the function and protection of the ocean for future generations.

The position offers the opportunity to pursue a doctoral degree as a member of the graduate school “Helmholtz School for Marine Data Science” (MarDATA). MarDATA is dedicated to training a new generation of “marine data scientists” by integrating expertise from computer science and mathematics into the field of ocean sciences. The school’s interdisciplinary focus spans supercomputing, modeling, (bio)informatics, robotics, statistics, and big data methodologies. Doctoral researchers benefit from a structured training program that promotes cross-disciplinary collaboration and provides in-depth scientific insight as well as a systematic approach to marine data science. For more information, visit: https://www.mardata.de/.

Projection and Job Description
This project aims at the key technology for the identification of patterns and relationships across disparate heterogeneous datasets that fundamentally improve our understanding of cold-water coral growth and finally improve predictive analysis for coral growth and health. Ecosystem engineering scleractinian cold-water corals (CWCs) create biodiversity and carbon cycling hotspots in the world’s oceans Current climate change is putting these ecosystems under particular stress and therefore require mitigation and even restoration measures. However, the factors that favour and/or prevent the distribution and abundance of cold-water corals and their reefs are not defined at a satisfactory level and thus challenge future predictions on how these ecosystems will develop. In the last two decades tremendous efforts have been made to measure and monitor physical biogeochemical parameters of ambient water masses of cold-water corals ecosystems in order to determine their controlling factors. However, so far there has been no coordinated effort to integrate these data bases in order to fully constrain and explore all environmental boundary conditions of cold-water coral growth with the development of novel machine learning techniques. The doctoral researcher will work in close collaboration between Paleo-Oceanography groups of PD. Dr. Jacek Raddatz and Dr. Sascha Flögel at GEOMAR and the Data Science group of Prof. Dr. Matthias Renz at the Faculty of Engineering at Kiel University. The doctoral researcher will thus be directly integrated into two larger, interdisciplinary, and team-oriented research units, both at GEOMAR and the Institute of Computer Science at Kiel University.

The research unit Paleo-Oceanography of the Research Division 1 Ocean Circulation and Climate Dynamics is offering the following position in the project “Spatial pattern mining and knowledge fusion to analyse, understand and predict occurrences of cold-water coral ecosystems” starting as soon as possible, presumably on 01st January 2027. Your Tasks:

Development of integrated data analytics workflows based on machine learning, data mining and data engineering to integrate extensive heterogeneous databases from regional to global scales
Development and evaluation of scalable data-driven methods to determine correlation patterns and parameters that determine or even exclude the presence of cold-water corals in Earth’s Ocean basins
Develop and evaluate novel machine learning techniques to identify/predict unknown cold-water coral occurrences
Planning, writing and submitting publications of scientific results from computer science (data science) and oceanography in the international literature and presentations at international conferences.
Required:...