Research Fellow in Next-Generation Urban Climate Modelling

Job Description

Research Fellow in Next-Generation Urban Climate Modelling Department: Department for Risk and Disaster Reduction: Grade: 7, spine point 32 Location: UCL Bloomsbury Campus, London

Reports to

Dr Ting Sun

About us

The UCL Department of Risk and Disaster Reduction (RDR) inspires innovation and evidence-based practice focused on improving disaster risk reduction (DRR) through our research, education, and partnerships. This creates a better life for many people by reducing the negative impacts of disasters.

The RDR is an exciting cross-UCL department, which leads research, knowledge exchange and teaching in the fields of risk and disaster reduction and humanitarian action. By providing a focus for UCL’s activities the RDR, with its breadth of disciplinary emphasis, promotion of novel multidisciplinary research and translation into practice, aims to assume a role of leadership both in the UK and internationally. The Department has 30 members of academic and teaching staff, 12 members of research staff ranging from research assistants to professorial research fellows and 9 members of professional services staff. The Department is in the Faculty of Mathematics and Physical Sciences (MAPS), but works across all UCL’s faculties, and contributes to UCL’s Grand Challenges.

Research.

The RDR strives to produce world-leading research in disaster risk reduction through a multidisciplinary perspective for the long-term benefit of humanity. The RDR has established the Humanitarian Institute, Centre for Digital Public Health in Emergencies, Centre for Gender and Disaster, and jointly with UCL Department of Science and Technology Studies the Warning Research Centre. The RDR conducts research around the themes of disaster risk reduction and resilience, cascading crises, natural hazards, climate change risk and adaptation, humanitarian crisis response, GIS and remote sensing, law and economics, conflict and migration, catastrophe modelling, warning, digital health in emergencies, and inclusivity including gender responsive resilience, in order to integrate education, research, innovation and enterprise for the long-term benefit of humanity.

Teaching.

The RDR aims to develop leaders and experts in disaster risk reduction research, education, and practice. We run PhD and MRes programmes in Risk and Disaster Reduction, MSc programmes in Risk, Disaster and Resilience and Risk and Disaster Science, and an undergraduate BSc programme in Global Humanitarian Studies, all with a diverse and cross-disciplinary international intake. We have about 25 PhD students, 90 masters students and will have about 180 students across the three years of the BSc programme from 2023-2024 academic year.

Knowledge Exchange, Public Policy and Research Impact.

The RDR seeks to empower all to break down barriers to global DRR knowledge. This knowledge exchange is a core part of the mission of the RDR, which it seeks to fulfil by publishing high-impact reports, engagement with the media and building long-term partnerships. RDR members have joined and led several field missions and contributed to multidisciplinary reports. These reports have been drawn on by the UK Cabinet Office and other government bodies in advice to ministers. RDR staff contributed substantially to the UCL-Lancet Commission on Migration and Health. The RDR has close links with London First, the business representative grouping, private companies, London Resilience and UK Government, including the Cabinet Office, and is developing links with intergovernmental organizations such as the International Migration Organization, Plan International, UN Women and other NGOs. UCL RDR runs regular events to engage the public and potential partners in issues relating to risk and disaster reduction and humanitarian action, such as its Annual Conference and Humanitarian Summit.

General

The RDR is located in the South Wing of the central UCL building in the main campus

About the project

SUEWS, the Surface Urban Energy and Water balance Scheme, is an urban land-surface model that simulates how cities exchange heat and water with the atmosphere. Thirteen years in continuous development, it underpins more than 500 publications and reaches practitioners through SuPy, its Python interface, through UMEP in QGIS, and through commercial platforms including Arup's UHeat, which assesses heat risk across London, Manchester and Birmingham.

SUEWS-Next is a two-year programme funded by the UKRI Research Software Maintenance Fund, managed by the Software Sustainability Institute under grant AH/Z000114/1. It moves SUEWS from software dependent on a small number of individuals to infrastructure the research community can sustain. UCL leads, with the University of Reading as partner. A Research Software Engineer at Reading leads the technical modernisation of the code base. This post, at UCL, leads the scientific and human half of the same problem.

Main purpose of the job

The Research Fellow is responsible for the scientific integrity and the institutional memory of SUEWS through a period of substantial technical change. They will establish the evidence that the model is correct. A working benchmark already tests each release against observations; the postholder takes it from one reference site to a set spanning contrasting climates, decides what counts as a pass, and sets out in one place, for the first time, what the model assumes, where those assumptions hold and where they do not.

They will also capture reasoning that has never been written down, through a structured interview programme with the model's developers and long-standing users: why particular parameterisations were chosen, what was tried and abandoned, and how the science was actually done. That material becomes the training and onboarding route through which new contributors join the project. The postholder will work closely with the PI and with the Research Software Engineer at Reading, and is expected to publish from this work and present it internationally.

About

You

You will hold a PhD in a discipline relevant to urban climate, environmental modelling or scientific computing, and be able to move confidently between observational data and model output. You will be confident working with scientific code and data, and will have a track record of publishing your own research. We care more about whether you can tell a right result from a wrong one than about how much code you have written, and we expect and welcome the use of AI coding assistants. You will write clearly for readers of very different backgrounds, from model developers to local authority users, and you will be comfortable drawing knowledge out of experienced colleagues and recording it faithfully. We are interested in capability rather than a particular career path: urban climate expertise reaches this field from architecture, public health, engineering and computing as often as from meteorology, and we welcome applications from any of those routes.

Please note that this post leads validation, documentation and knowledge transfer rather than core code development, which is led by the Research Software Engineer at the University of Reading.

Duties and responsibilities

• Curate approximately ten reference validation datasets from urban eddy-covariance and meteorological observations, spanning contrasting climates, to serve as the project's benchmark cases.
• Extend, operate and scientifically govern the project's validation benchmark, taking it from a single reference site to the full set, and establish defensible variance bands for different classes of application.
• Author and maintain the Scientific Consistency Handbook, documenting the model's assumptions, validity ranges, boundary conditions, known limitations and uncertainty, and publish it online with changelogs and release-linked DOIs.
• Produce application-specific validation reports and quarterly validation summaries so that users can cite evidence that the model is fit for their purpose.
• Support the formal review of proposed changes to model physics, ensuring each carries a documented rationale, validation evidence and impact assessment.
• Design and conduct a programme of around twenty recorded conversations with SUEWS developers, long-standing users and industry adopters, released as a podcast series where participants agree, and edited into durable written records.
• Write architecture and scientific decision records that capture why particular parameterisations and design choices were made.
• Contribute to the contributor handbook and to learning pathways that take a new contributor from first use to first merged change.
• Produce video tutorials and worked notebooks, including material in which senior developers explain the physical reasoning behind the code.
• Develop materials for the project's training programme and co-deliver quarterly workshops and the annual international symposium, in accessible hybrid format.
• Design, run and write up the project's pre-registered evaluations of development practice, including whether AI-assisted changes preserve the model's physical correctness, and publish the results including those that do not favour the tools under test.
• Publish in peer-reviewed journals and present findings at international conferences.
• Work in the open through the project's public repositories, follow its governance process, collaborate closely with the Research Software Engineer at the University of Reading, and contribute to quarterly reporting to the Software Sustainability Institute.
• Actively follow UCL policies including Equal Opportunities and Equality policies.
• Maintain an awareness of and observe Fire and Health & Safety Regulations.

The postholder should be willing and able to travel within the UK and internationally for workshops and conferences, though we are happy to discuss appropriate accommodations to account for caring responsibilities or other considerations.

Contractual Details

The position is available from 1 January 2027, or as soon as possible thereafter, and is funded for a period of 12 months in the first instance. The successful applicant will be subject to the usual UCL probationary procedures. Full time is 36.5 hours per week, with times of work agreed with line manager. We will consider applications to work on a part-time, flexible and job share basis wherever possible. Annual leave is 27 working days for a full-time member of staff + 6 UCL closure days in addition to 8 Bank Holidays.

In addition to the above text, the following forms part of the job description:

• All staff are expected to demonstrate their ongoing commitment to academic excellence; that is, to the conduct of research, publication, teaching, enabling and other forms of knowledge transfer, at the highest levels of international achievement.
• Follow and actively promote the UCL Core Behaviours
• Carry out any other duties within the scope, spirit and purpose of the job as requested by the line manager.
• This job description may be reviewed and be subject to amendment in consultation with the post holder.
• UCL offers hybrid working where appropriate and the successful applicant may normally work remotely for up to 40% of the week if they wish.
• The staff member is responsible for carrying out their duties in a way that embodies UCL's environmental and social sustainability values, actively supporting UCL’s Sustainability Strategy, policies, and objectives within the remit of their role
• This job description reflects the present requirements of the post, and as duties and responsibilities change/develop, the job description will be reviewed and be subject to amendment in consultation with the post holder.

Person Specification

Note to job applicant: copy and paste the following criteria into your “Statement in support of your application” and describe underneath each criteria how you meet it, giving examples. You will be scored on how you meet each criteria.

Criteria: Essential or Desirable Assessment method (Application/Interview)

Qualifications, experience and knowledge

PhD in a discipline relevant to urban climate, meteorology, atmospheric or environmental science, physical geography, hydrology, engineering, physics, or computational or data science. We will consider applicants who have submitted their PhD thesis, but not yet been awarded their PhD. In this case, they will be initially paid at grade 6B until the PhD award is confirmed: Essential Application Experience of analysing observational environmental datasets and comparing them against model output, with the judgement to distinguish a model error from a measurement artefact: Essential Application, Interview and Selection task Good working knowledge of the physical basis of land-surface or surface energy balance modelling: Essential Application and Interview Able to work confidently with scientific code and data: reading, running, adapting and debugging analysis code in Python, working with version control, and judging whether a result is correct. We are interested in what you can get right rather than in how much code you have written yourself, and we expect and welcome the use of AI coding assistants: Essential Application and Selection task Publication of own research in peer-reviewed journals: Essential Application Excellent written and verbal communication, demonstrated by having produced documentation, tutorials or training material that another audience went on to use, and by the ability to write clearly for readers ranging from model developers to local authority and practitioner users: Essential Application and Interview Familiarity with SUEWS, SuPy, UMEP, or a comparable urban or land-surface model: Desirable Application Experience of working with eddy-covariance flux data and its quality control: Desirable Application

Skills and abilities

Ability to draw knowledge out of experienced colleagues and record it accurately, for example through structured interviews: Essential Application and Interview

Initiative and ownership: having identified what a piece of work needed and carried it through without being directed to, together with an interest in how research software reaches real use by practitioners, industry or policy: Essential Application and Interview

Personal attributes

Demonstrated intellectual curiosity: having followed a question further than the work required, taught yourself something substantial outside your formal training, or gone looking for why something behaved in a way you did not expect: Essential Application and Interview Ability to work collaboratively across institutions and in the open, including through public code review and community forums: Essential Application and Interview Committed to UCL's policies of equal opportunity and equality, diversity and inclusion, and able to work well with academic and non-academic colleagues and students of all cultures and backgrounds: Essential Application and Interview

Application Procedure

Please apply online at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/hr/jobs/. Your application should include:

• A statement in support of your application, addressing each of the essential criteria in the person specification and describing with examples how you meet it. Maximum 2 pages;
• A CV of no more than 2 pages, to include any publications;
• Up to three pieces of work you are willing to have looked at, with a link or an attachment and one or two sentences on each saying what it is and what your part in it was. A paper or a thesis chapter is welcome, and so is a public repository, a series of commits or pull requests, an issue thread, a piece of documentation, a notebook, a dataset or a recorded talk. Where the work was collaborative, please say what you did. Some of the best work is not public, whether because it was done in industry, under commercial confidentiality, or simply offline. If that is true of yours, describe it instead, or send us something written for the purpose. You will not be scored down for it;
• Details of 3 referees.

You are welcome to use AI assistants in preparing your application. We would ask that you write the first draft yourself: we are interested in your experience and your judgement, and an application that reads as though it was generated rather than written does not help you. Shortlisted candidates will be asked to complete a short practical task in which the use of AI tools is expected rather than restricted, and we will provide the tools.

There are a range of skills and experiences that could be relevant for this job and so we encourage you to apply if you feel you meet the essential criteria and are excited by the role. We do not expect candidates to have all the desirable criteria.

Further information about the application process may be obtained from the departmental HR administrator on irdr-hr@ucl.ac.uk.

For informal enquiries about the vacancy, please contact Dr Ting Sun, ting.sun@ucl.ac.uk.