Research Associate in High-Order Mesh Generation

Job id: 104485. Salary: £47,632 per annum, including London Weighting Allowance.

Posted: 17 January 2025. Closing date: 23 January 2025.

Business unit: Natural, Mathematical & Engineering Sci. Department: Engineering.

Contact details: David Moxey. david.moxey@kcl.ac.uk

Location: Strand Campus. Category: Research.

About us

Recently re-founded, the Department of Engineering is rapidly expanding into a world-class research and teaching department. Research currently focuses on computational engineering, information processing systems, robotics, telecommunications, and biomedical engineering, but we are looking to establish new research themes.

This post will be affiliated with the computational engineering research group within the department.

About the role

This role will support the delivery of a mesh generation project, funded under a recent EPSRC Impact Accelerator Account award, to improve the capabilities and performance of the high-order mesh generation software NekMesh. Working in Prof. David Moxey’s group at King’s College London, together with partners at UCL’s advanced research computing group and industrial partners, the successful applicant will help to provide NekMesh with the user-focused development required to get this presently-specialist tool into the hands of general practitioners.

In particular, the successful applicant for this role will lead the programming and development of high-order mesh generation and solver technology that is required to meet this challenging problem. These will be implemented in the Nektar++ framework ( www.nektar.info) and its associated mesh generation package, NekMesh. They will also have the opportunity to engage with a number of partners amongst the Nektar++ community and its connections in industrial applications and other projects in Prof. Moxey’s group.

This is a full time contract, and you will be offered an a fixed term contract until the 2nd October 2025.

About you

To be successful in this role, we are looking for candidates to have the following skills and experience:

Essential criteria

1. PhD or equivalent qualification/experience in a related field of study (e.g. applied mathematics, computational engineering, scientific computing, etc).

2. Knowledge of high-order methods and high-order mesh generation.

3. Strong scientific computing background, with experience of different architectures (e.g. CPUs/GPUs) and their use in high-performance computing through shared or distributed parallel programming (e.g. OpenMP, MPI).

4. Strong programming ability in C++.

5. Experience with the Nektar++ spectral/hp element framework and its mesh generator, NekMesh.

6. Excellent written and verbal communication skills.

7. Ability to collaborate actively with internal and external collaborators to develop and complete research projects.

Desirable criteria

1. Experience of managing research projects and research teams.

2. Experience of postgraduate supervision.

3. Experience of acting/directing research as principal investigator.

Downloading a copy of our Job Description

• Please note that this is a PhD level role but candidates who have submitted their thesis and are awaiting award of their PhDs will be considered. In these circumstances the appointment will be made at Grade 5, spine point 30 with the title of Research Assistant. Upon confirmation of the award of the PhD, the job title will become Research Associate and the salary will increase to Grade 6.

Further Information

We pride ourselves on being inclusive and welcoming. We embrace diversity and want everyone to feel that they belong and are connected to others in our community.

We are committed to working with our staff and unions on these and other issues, to continue to support our people and to develop a diverse and inclusive culture at King’s.

We ask all candidates to submit a copy of their CV, and a supporting statement, detailing how they meet the essential criteria listed in the advert. If we receive a strong field of candidates, we may use the desirable criteria to choose our final shortlist, so please include your evidence against these where possible.

To find out how our managers will review your application, please take a look at our ‘ How we Recruit’ pages.

We are able to offer sponsorship for candidates who do not currently possess the right to work in the UK.