Job Description

UE07: 40,497 - 48,149 per annum, pro rata (22.19 - 26.38 per hour)

Edinburgh Earth Initiative, Department for Social Responsibility and Sustainability

Part Time, 9 hours per week

Fixed-term for three months from May 2025

The Edinburgh College of Art are looking for a PhD student to contribute to a project funded by the Edinburgh Global / Cornell Seed Fund. This 12-week project is centred around the production of a three day "happenings" in May (28-30) culminating in a public showcase of speculative work, visualised imaginaries and textual manifestos for change leading to regenerative computing infrastructures.



Click here to view the full project brief for the Earth Fellow: Recomputing the planet, including key tasks and deliverables (opens browser in new tab).


Click here to view the general Earth Fellow job description (opens browser in new tab). Please refer to both the project brief and job description when outlining your skills and experience in your application.



This post will be appointed at Grade UE07, step 1 which is 40,497 per annum, pro rata (22.19 per hour).

Earth Fellowships are only open to current postgraduate and PhD students at the University of Edinburgh who are based in the UK.

Please do not apply if you are not a current University of Edinburgh student.

Your skills and attributes for success:

Current University of Edinburgh PhD student in the academic year '24/'25. A desire to critically address global issues at the intersection of energy, computation, digitisation and subsequent environmental impacts. An affinity for academic concepts and discourse across disciplines such as geosciences, engineering, computer science, science and technology studies, and the humanities (in particular, art and design). Experience planning and facilitating workshops, hackathons, and other creative events leading to participants creating outputs for dissemination. The ability to present and communicate complex information including: visualisation and graphics skills; IT skills to present work through projection and digital display; and experience in poster preparation, exhibition composition and layout. Ability to work in a team environment, with skills in helping and supporting others in the development of collective projects. An ability to take notes and memos from interviews, meetings and discussions, to be readily convertible to sharable documents. Our happenings events, the core of our project, are taking place at the end of May and will require attendance at our plenary session on Saturday, May 31. This is the only non-weekday we are expecting the Earth Fellow to work with us and our guests from Cornell.


As an Earth Fellow, you will be joining a diverse, fun and dynamic team of researchers, students and staff all working together to address the global climate emergency. As part of the Earth Fellows programme, you will have access to co-working space, exciting networking and personal development opportunities and opportunities to contribute towards partnerships and solutions for climate change on a global scale.


Earth Fellows work on individual and team-based projects which contribute to the University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh Earth Initiative's work on climate change research-led impact, innovation, engagement, and teaching.

As a valued member of our team you can expect:

An exciting, positive, creative, challenging and rewarding place to work alongside the Edinburgh Earth Initiative team and Earth Fellows community which includes undergraduate, postgraduate and PhD students as well as the wider student community, academics, professional services, and global partners working on climate and environmental change. We give you support, nurture your talent and reward success.


You will benefit from a competitive reward package and a wide range of staff benefits, which includes a generous holiday entitlement, a defined benefits pension scheme, staff discounts, family-friendly initiatives, flexible working and much more. Click to access our staff benefits page (opens new browser tab) for further information and use our reward calculator to find out the total value of pay and benefits provided.

Championing equality, diversity and inclusion

The University of Edinburgh holds a Silver Athena SWAN award in recognition of our commitment to advance gender equality in higher education. We are members of the Race Equality Charter and we are also Stonewall Scotland Diversity Champions, actively promoting LGBT equality.


Prior to any employment commencing with the University you will be required to evidence your right to work in the UK. Further information is available on our

right to work webpages

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On this occasion the University will not consider applicants requiring sponsorship for this role. International workers will therefore only be able to take up this role if they can demonstrate an alternative right to work in the UK.

Key dates to note

The closing date for applications is 30 April 2025.


Unless stated otherwise the closing time for applications is 11:59pm GMT. If you are applying outside the UK the closing time on our adverts automatically adjusts to your browsers local time zone.


Interviews will be held during early May.