Assoc/Prof. Kat Fitsimmons PhD Projects

PhD opportunity for international candidates in drylands research at Monash University

Please contact Kathryn Fitzsimmons by the end of June. Include a 1-page letter outlining your main interests and reasons for pursuing a PhD, and your CV with relevant academic grades and publications.

Monash University is advertising a PhD project investigating the response of desert-margin sand dunes to climatic and land-use change, to work with A/Prof Kat Fitzsimmons and Manu Hinojosa within the School of Earth, Atmosphere and the Environment in Melbourne, Australia. Monash ranks in the top 50 universities globally, and Melbourne is one of the world’s most liveable cities.

Please see below for more information on the project. Candidates should address enquiries to Kathryn Fitzsimmons; please make contact before applying. Please include in the email a 1-page letter of motivation, outlining your primary area of interest and reason for pursuing a PhD in this field, and your CV including your academic transcripts.

Funding including stipend, fees and project costs is available on a competitive basis to all international candidates. There is no deadline to apply; the position will remain open until the ideal candidate is found.

The details:

Australia is the driest inhabited continent, and represents a region vulnerable to future aridification. Climate models predict that Australia will become drier overall; future droughts will become longer and more intense. On the Earth’s surface, a critical part of the process of aridification involves the reactivation of ancient desert landforms, such as sand dunes, preserved on present-day dryland margins. However, we cannot as yet reliably evaluate the threshold conditions for mobilisation and stabilisation of dunes like these.

This PhD project will address the issue: Under what conditions do desert landforms become active, and under what conditions do they stabilise?

The last few decades (1990s – present) include the extreme Millennium Drought and recent wet La Niña years. The project will use novel field-, lab- and GIS-based methods to quantify and compare land-surface activity of desert-margin dunes in natural bushland and adjacent farmland in the southeastern Australian mallee region, to decouple the human land-use component from natural landscape response to short-term climate variability over the last decades.

Candidates are expected to have a strong background in physical geography, Earth sciences and/or GIS and remote sensing. Experience in GIS and machine-learning applications to GIS is desirable, but not essential. The project will include national and international collaborations, including with stakeholders in the field region.