Post-Doctoral Researcher/Senior Post-Doctoral Researcher – AUTONOMY & HVDC4ISLANDS

Applications are invited for the post of postdoctoral/senior postdoctoral researcher in power systems engineering to join an ambitious new research project called AUTONOMY hosted at University College Cork, Ireland. The AUTONOMY project has secured more than €1M in funding and will be supported by the MaREI Research Ireland Centre www.marei.ie and its industry and community partners. Inspired by recent advances in artificial intelligence, AUTONOMY will create new tools to manage electrical energy resources at the local level and maximise the economic benefits for individuals and communities when interacting with the energy markets. AUTONOMY will pioneer a novel transfer learning approach to exchange expert knowledge amongst energy manager agents in different communities across the grid, as part of a wider strategy to decentralise grid energy balancing and coordinate multiple energy resources at the local level.

 

The successful candidate will also contribute to a new European consortium research project called HVDC4ISLANDS. This project will develop and test new electrical designs for “energy islands”, renewable energy hubs intended to accelerate the transition to clean energy. The MaREI Centre at University College Cork are one of nine partners in the consortium, which is made up of leading European research institutions including IMDEA Energy (Spain), SINTEF (Norway), RWTH Aachen (Germany), National Technical University of Athens (Greece), and the Austrian Institute of Technology. MaREI’s role in the project investigates the integration of new energy island/hub designs into European electricity grids and markets.  

The ideal candidate will hold a PhD in power systems engineering or a related discipline and will have experience of modelling power systems using industry standard software tools. The candidate should have a track record of research excellence and should have existing publications in the top international journals in the field. Experience of carrying out research projects in collaboration with industry partners would also be an advantage.

Working location:  The successful applicant will be based at the historic main campus of University College Cork https://www.ucc.ie/  located a short walking distance from the centre of Cork city. UCC is a welcoming, diverse, and modern workplace, and is one of the world’s most sustainable Universities, holding a top ten place in the UI GreenMetric World University Rankings since 2010.

The MaREI Centre of Energy, Climate and Marine www.marei.ie is the Research Ireland (RI) centre of excellence in Energy, Climate and Marine research in Ireland.  The MaREI Centre includes 13 Universities, Third Level Institutes and Research Organisations, has 103 industrial partners and has research funding of approximately €60m.  It combines the expertise of a wide range of research groups and industry partners, with the shared mission of solving the main scientific, technical and socio-economic challenges across the energy, climate, and marine domains.