PhD student for Bedload Dynamics (f/m/d)

Job description

The Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL is part of the ETH Domain. Approximately 600 people work on the sustainable use and protection of the environment and on the handling of natural hazards. PhD student for Bedload Dynamics (f/m/d) The Mountain Hydrology and Mass Movement research unit investigates natural hazard processes in mountainous terrains, including landslides and debris flows. It is planned to fill the following position by January 2027. As part of a research project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, we are hiring a PhD student to investigate the dynamics and spatial-temporal variability of bedload transport. Special focus is on WSL’s torrential observatory at Erlenbach (Alptal, Switzerland) and novel monitoring methods including seismic nodes and/or fibre optic technology with distributed acoustic sensing (DAS). A key project objective is to develop monitoring capabilities, which allow observations of bedload mobilization along a torrent reach. To this end, a network of near-torrent seismic sensors will be deployed, which provides temporal and spatial resolution of variations in bedload activity. The successful candidate s...