All Things Urban

The internationally renowned Technische Universität Berlin is located in Germany’s capital city at the heart of Europe. Our academic activities are focused on achieving sharply-defined goals: building a distinctive profile for our university, ensuring exceptional performance in research and teaching, providing our graduates with excellent qualifications and a modern approach to university administration.

The research assist­ant will work within the inter­na­tional and inter­dis­cip­lin­ary pro­ject ide3a and in a team of 5 peer research assist­ants called “ide3a ambas­sad­ors” within the topic of “Crit­ical Infra­struc­ture & Digit­al­isa­tion”. ide3a aims to imple­ment the inter-dis­cip­lin­ary topic of “Crit­ical Infra­struc­ture & Digit­al­isa­tion” in tra­di­tional research-based study pro­grams, com­bined with gami­fic­a­tion mech­an­isms and short courses, access­ible inter­na­tion­ally by the ide3a part­ner uni­versit­ies and sup­por­ted by digital edu­ca­tion plat­forms and open know­ledge tools.

The research assist­ant will be loc­ated with the URD research group (http://www.ecdf-urd.tu-berlin.de) at TU Ber­lin and, with other ide3a ambas­sad­ors, will have access to com­mon facil­it­ies in the inter­dis­cip­lin­ary work­ing envir­on­ment of the Ein­stein Cen­ter Digital Future. As Prof. Rabe also holds the CEO pos­i­tion at the Kom­pet­en­zzen­trum Wasser Ber­lin GmbH, a col­lab­or­a­tion with its mem­bers as asso­ci­ate part­ners is planned. Moreover, most of the research activ­it­ies will be developed as col­lab­or­at­ive efforts between research groups based at TU Ber­lin and research groups loc­ated at ide3a part­ner uni­versit­ies in Europe (Nor­we­gian Uni­versity of Sci­ence and Tech­no­logy, Dub­lin City Uni­versity, Cra­cow Uni­versity of Tech­no­logy, Politec­nico di Mil­ano). Short research stays in these uni­versit­ies are highly encour­aged and fin­an­cially sup­por­ted by ide3a.

The can­did­ate will research on devel­op­ing mod­els and tools to sim­u­late urban water cycles as integ­rated com­pon­ents of multi-sec­toral sim­u­la­tion mod­els. As part of the urban envir­on­ment this includes inter­con­nec­tions with other crit­ical infra­struc­tures (e.g., elec­tric grid, tele­com­mu­nic­a­tion net­works, mobil­ity, eco­logy and other urban net­works). The core goal of the ide3a ambas­sador team and ide3a col­lab­or­at­ors will be the devel­op­ment of a multi-layered digital, open source, ser­i­ous game to enable scen­ario ana­lysis, sim­u­la­tion, and optim­iz­a­tion of urban crit­ical infra­struc­ture sys­tems under het­ero­gen­eous social, tech­nical, and cli­mate scen­arios. A pro­fes­sional game will sup­port these activ­it­ies.

The tasks for this pos­i­tion include

• the pub­lic­a­tion of the research out­comes in sci­entific papers and present­a­tion to national and inter­na­tional con­fer­ences,
• con­tri­bu­tions to the e-learn­ing activ­it­ies and hack­a­thon organ­iz­a­tion within the activ­it­ies of the ide3a pro­ject, and
• guid­ance to BSc/MSc stu­dents in their thesis pre­par­a­tion.

Finally, the pos­i­tion also includes the option to pre-pare a PhD thesis within the scope of ide3a top­ics.

• Suc­cess­fully com­pleted uni­versity degree (Mas­ter, Dip­lom or equi­val­ent) in urban plan­ning or geoin­form­at­ics/geo­graphy or rel­ev­ant engin­eer­ing dis­cip­lines, includ­ing civil and envir­on­mental engin­eer­ing or a related field
• Excel­lent com­mu­nic­a­tion skills, team­work skills, pro­act­ive beha­vior, and com­mit­ment
• Envir­on­mental mod­el­ling skills / GIS (focus water cycles)
• Very good writ­ten and oral lan­guage skills in Eng­lish - at least C1 Level and good writ­ten and oral lan­guage skills in Ger­man; or the will­ing­ness to learn either Eng­lish or Ger­man is expec­ted

Prefer­able:

• Know­ledge in cir­cu­lar eco­nomy con­cepts
• Good pro­gram­ming skills in at least one pro­gram­ming lan­guage
• Good know­ledge of stat­ist­ics and math­em­at­ical mod­el­ling
• prior exper­i­ence in water related urban plan­ning (e.g Sponge City, Water Sens­it­ive Urban Plan­ning, cir­cu­lar eco­nomy con­cepts) includ­ing sys­tem mod­el­ling insight (e.g. water and spa­tial mod­el­ling)
• prior exper­i­ence in game devel­op­ment and co-teach­ing activ­it­ies

We’re not fully sure whether this role is open to international candidates. If you would need visa sponsorship or work authorisation, we recommend checking directly with the employer before applying.