Are you interested to work with me or my colleagues, inTrento, as a post-doc in hydrology and Earth System Sciences ? Well, there are two main ways to do it and all of it has to do with the source of funding. If the funds comes from our own research, we expect that the post-doc interacts actively with the topics on which we are working on. Coming to me, there are many places in this blog where one can deduce what I am doing, but the characteristic of my research work is the commitment to build the GEOframe infrastructure. Therefore for applicants who wants to work with me, a good idea is to learn the use of GEOframe from the Winter School and the Summer School we held every year. There is a plenty of material (slides, video, codes, food for thinking) that we have prepared with which willing people can self-instruct. We also, I mean the group of GEOframers, will be very proactive in helping you if you want to learn it. Start here or here. To sum up: do you want to work with me/us ? Sweat to learn GEOframe! In the meanwhile you'll do it we will have time to know each other and understanding if we can get along whilst creating for you a reputation independent from ours.
A postdoc is though to be a pro-active person in the group making to advance the research, supporting Ph.D. Students, injecting new ideas and enthusiasm. Therefore learning to do what we do is just a prerequisite. We have expectations that they postdocs is able to pose research questions, suggest solutions, indicate new roads, leading the writing of papers for the best journals, and make our small community more rich.
Researchers who are more mature in this can try to get a grant by themselves, for instance, getting a grant through a project proposal, like, for instance, the Marie Slowdowska Curie calls. In this case, it is more appropriate to say that we can host their research in Trento University DICAM or C3A. They, grant winners, has their own research to pursue which is not exactly the mine and, in a sense, it cannot be. But I can give them support, exchange ideas, walk with them along the road drawn. It can be fun for both, and I am sure Trento is a nice place to do it. It is obviously worth if there is some connection with what I know and I am practicing or someone of us is doing.
An intermediate step would be to try to design, in advance, together, the project, before presenting it. I am, we are, available to help.
For other information, please give a look to what I wrote for Ph.D. Student applicants. We are talking, usually, of different ages, different maturity, different goals but some arguments remain the same.
Please, remind that I am also committed to produce open source software (meaning we do code and we do it open source) and open science. The most open possible. People with medieval attitude to science (i.e. who hide it selfish) can avoid the discussions applying elsewhere.
