PhD student in Wildfires and Climate Risk, with a focus on Europe and Africa

Technical University of Crete (TUC), Greece
Closing date: 30 April 2026

A fully funded PhD position is available in Atmospheric Environment and Climate Change Laboratory (climate.tuc) of the Technical University of Crete, led by Professor Apostolos Voulgarakis, AXA Chair in Wildfires and Climate. The PhD student will work within the frame of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Doctoral Network project “Understanding and Predicting Impacts of Climate Extremes under Global Change (CLIMES)”. The project’s international consortium is coordinated by Uppsala University. The PhD student will be part of a leading cohort of early-career researchers studying different aspects of impacts of climate extremes in Europe and Africa (from public health and agriculture to socio-economic perspectives) and will have access to a rich programme of training activities and research exchanges designed to enhance career prospects in both academia and the private sector.

The work will focus on:

  • Assessing changes in fire occurrence and burnt area, with a focus on extreme wildfires, under future climate and land-use scenarios for Europe and Africa.
  • Performing simulations with two fire-enabled dynamic global vegetation models (JULES-INFERNO and LPJ-GUESS), running sensitivity experiments to isolate the impact of climate change versus land-use/vegetation characteristics on fire regimes.
  • Using AI techniques to infer fire occurrence and burnt area from environmental drivers such as meteorological, land-use/vegetation, and human-related variables.
  • Estimating future European and African wildfires risk using the AI model, driven by future climate and land use data.
  • Compare the AI estimates to those from the physical models employed in the first part of the project.
  • Evaluating potential repercussions of fire-emitted air pollutants on public health.The work is inherently collaborative and will involve close interaction with other doctoral candidates and partners in the CLIMES network. The student will be based in TUC, and will be expected to attend international meetings, network-wide training events and complete two in-person international secondments:
  • An academic secondment at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden (group of Prof. Elena Raffetti, Deputy Director of the Swedish Centre for Impacts of Climate Extremes and Assistant Professor of Public Health Epidemiology), to investigate possible repercussions of fire-emitted air pollutants on public health.
  • A non-academic secondment at the AXA Climate company in Paris (supervised by of Dr. Christelle Castet, Head of Science at AXA Climate, and Dr. Luiz Galizia, expert on wildfire risk modelling), working on integrating the projections and models developed into the design of parametric fire insurance and climate risk assessment.

The studentship will also involve frequent interactions with members of the Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires, Environment and Society, based in London, to which the Technical University of Crete is an officially affiliated Organisation (via climate.tuc).

Formal MSCA eligibility conditions (must be fulfilled at the time of recruitment):

  • Mobility rule: The student must not have resided or carried out their main activity (work, studies, etc.) in Greece for more than 12 months in the 3 years immediately before the recruitment date (short stays such as holidays, and compulsory national service, do not count).
  • Early-Stage Researcher status: At the time of recruitment the student must be within the first four years of their research career (full-time equivalent) and must not already hold a doctoral degree. The four-year period is measured from the date of the degree that formally entitles the student to embark on a PhD.

For more information and how to apply, please see: https://euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/410472

For further information about the position, please contact:

  • Prof. Apostolos Voulgarakis
  • AXA Chair in Wildfires and Climate
  • School of Chemical and Environmental Engineering
  • Technical University of Crete, Chania, Greece
  • E-mail: avoulgarakis@tuc.gr

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