There is an awesome position opening up for an assistant professor in systematics at the University of Vermont. Below is the announcement, and see the original post at the Distributed Ecology blog. Why is this related to R? One can do a lot of systematics work in R, including retrieving scientific collections data through an upcoming package handshaking with VertNet (part of the rOpenSci project), managing large data sets, retrieval of GenBank data through the ape package (see fxn read.genbank), phylogenetic reconstruction and analysis, and more. So I am sure a systematist with R ninja skills will surely have a head up on the rest of the field. 


Assistant Professor in Systematics

Department of Biology
University of Vermont
Burlington, Vermont

The Department of Biology of the University of Vermont seeks applications for a tenure- track Assistant Professor position in Systematics and Evolutionary Biology of arthropods, especially insects. The position will be open in the fall of 2012. The successful candidate will have expertise in classical and molecular systematics, including analysis of complex data sets. Candidates pursuing phylogenomics and innovative methods in bioinformatics in combination with taxonomy are especially encouraged to apply. Department information at: http://www.uvm.edu/~biology/.


All applicants are expected to: 1) hold a Ph.D. degree in relevant disciplines and have two or more years of postdoctoral experience; 2) develop a competitively funded research program; 3) teach undergraduate courses (chosen from among general biology, evolution, systematic entomology, and others in the candidate's expertise); 4) teach, mentor and advise undergraduate and graduate students; and 5) oversee a natural history collection of historic significance.

Candidates must apply online: http://www.uvmjobs.com/. On left see "Search Postings" then find "Biology" under "HCM Department" then posting 0040090 (first posting). Sorry, but we cannot supply the direct link because it will time out.

Attach a cover letter with a statement of research focus and teaching interests (one document), a curriculum vitae, representative publications, and the contact information of three references.

Review of applications will begin on September 15, 2011, and will continue until the position is filled. Questions and up to three additional publications may be directed to Dr. Jos. J. Schall: jschall@uvm.edu.

The University of Vermont recently identified several "Spires of Excellence" in which it will strategically focus institutional investments and growth over the next several years. One spire associated with the position is Complex Systems. Candidates whose research interests align with this spire are especially encouraged to applyhttp://www.uvm.edu/~tri/.
The University seeks faculty who can contribute to the diversity and excellence of the academic community through their research, teaching, and/or service. Applicants are requested to include in their cover letter information about how they will further this goal. The University of Vermont is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity employer. The Department is committed to increasing faculty diversity and welcomes applications from women, underrepresented ethnic, racial and cultural groups, and from people with disabilities.

Interesting talks/posters:

Interesting talks/posters:

Monday was a good day at ESA in Austin. There were a few topics I promised to report on in my blogging/tweeting.


...focused on open source data. Carly Strasser's presentation on guidelines for data management was awesome (including other talks in the symposium on Creating Effective Data Management Plans for Ecological Research). Although this was a good session, I can't help but wish that they had hammered home the need for open science more. Oh well. Also, they talked a lot about how, and not a lot of why we should properly curate data. Still, a good session. One issue Carly and I talked about was tracking code in versioning systems such as Github. There doesn't seem to be a culture of versioning code for analyses/simulations in ecology. But when we get there...it will be easier to share/track/collaborate on  code.

...used R software. David Jennings talked about a meta-analysis asking if phylogenetic distance influences competition strength in pairwise experiments. David used the metafor package in R to do his meta-analysis. Good form sir.

...did cool science. Matt Helmus presented a great talk on phylogenetic species area curves (likely using R, or Matlab maybe?).


p.s. We launched rOpenSci today.


Oddities:

• The Tilman effect - Tilman's talk was so packed it looked like there was a line waiting to get into a trendy bar. Here's a picture (credit: Jaime Ashander). Bigger room next time anyone? 
• Wiley came out with an open source journal called Ecology and Evolution. This brings them to 3 open source journals (the other two are in other fields). We (rOpenSci) will attempt to hand-shake with these journals. 
• The vegetarian lunch option was surprisingly good. Nice. 

Our development team would like to announce the launch of rOpenSci. As the title states, this project aims to create R packages to make open science more available to researchers.

http://ropensci.org/

What this means is that we seek to connect researchers using R with as much open data as possible, mainly through APIs. There are a number of R packages that already do this (e.g., infochimps, twitteR), but we are making more packages, e.g., for Mendeley, PLoS Journals, and taxonomic sources (ITIS, EOL, TNRS, Phylomatic, UBio).

Importantly, we are creating a package called rOpenSci, which aims to integrate functions from packages for individual open data sources.

If you are somewhat interested, follow our progress on our website, on Twitter, or contact us. If you are really² interested you could go to Github and contribute. If  you are really³ interested, join our development team.