Postdoctoral researcher: Chemical Diversity of Amazonian Plant 80 %

Our Department of Systematic and Evolutionary Botany houses modern molecular and ecological labs, an herbarium comprising 3,000,000 plant specimens (United Herbaria of UZH and ETH, the 15th largest herbarium in the world), and a Botanical Garden with 8,000 species. The mission of the Department is to “increase the knowledge of plant diversity, the processes and patterns of plant evolution, the relationships between plants and other organisms and aspects of plant conservation.” Our collaborators at the Department of Chemistry have state-of-the-art instruments for screening plant metabolomes, computational facilities with databases of natural products, and structure elucidation software. The University of Zurich has a broad research coverage of organismal and molecular biology. The city of Zurich offers excellent quality of life and attractive surroundings for outdoor sports.

Reporting to Prof Rodrigo Cámara-Leret, the postdoctoral researcher will work within the SNSF Starting Grant project INDIGENOMICS, which investigates the diversity and distribution of plant chemical traits and their relationships with human use. The project aims to document and explain patterns in the chemical diversity of plants used by people, with a particular focus on tropical regions. By integrating metabolomics, biodiversity data, and ethnobotanical information, the project seeks to better understand how plant chemical diversity underpins the benefits that biodiversity provides to societies and how these resources can be conserved and used sustainably.

The Cámara-Leret lab offers a collaborative research environment with high-quality supervision and a vibrant international team. The successful candidate will actively collaborate across disciplines and project partners, including Prof. Lauren Raz (Instituto de Ciencias Naturales, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá), Prof. Laurent Bigler (Department of Chemistry, UZH), and Dr. Mathieu Perret and Dr. Fred Stauffer (Conservatoire et Jardin botaniques de Genève), among others.