Postdoctoral researcher opportunity at GeoOcean (UBO)

[Marissa YATES]

Dear all, 

We are seeking a motivated postdoctoral researcher to join our team working on developing modeling tools to estimate beach morphological changes in response to climate change, including wave climate and sea level changes. The EvolPlage project, a joint UBO, URN, ENPC, Cerema project financed by the French DGALN, will fund this 12-month postdoctoral position, renewable for an additional 12 months, at the UBO in Plouzané (Brest), France. 

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This postdoctoral researcher position is part of the EvolPlage project, which is a research and innovation partnership between the

Geo-Ocean (UBO), M2C (URN), and LHSV (ENPC) laboratories, and the Cerema (Risks, Water, and Seas - research team RHITME,

associated with the M2C laboratory). The project is financed by the DGALN (French Directorate-General for Planning, Housing, and

Nature) and focuses on the development of new tools to improve estimates of shoreline evolution in response to changes in wave

climate and mean sea levels. The EvolPlage project (2024-2028) grew out of a collaboration that began in 2014. The postdoctoral

researcher will be located at the UBO in the research unit (UMR) GeoOcean (https://www.geo-ocean.fr/) and will work with a research team including the project leaders, a thesis student (located at the URN), and several interns who will be working at the 4 sites of the project partners. 

The most commonly used approaches for predicting medium to long-term shoreline changes are primarily based on the extrapolation

of historical trends and the application of an empirical formula, called the Bruun Rule, to estimate the impacts of sea level rise. These approaches generate potentially large uncertainties, and a family of models called reduced-complexity models, which are a

compromise between the physical processes modeled explicitly and the computational time, are currently the focus of many studies

in the international scientific community. The objective of the postdoctoral project is to investigate and implement aan innovative approach for taking into account the impacts of mean sea level changes in equilibrium-type shoreline change models. To validate the application of the new model at mutli-decadal to centennial scales, the project aims to analyze the model sensitivity and the temporal evolution of the calibration parameters (e.g. intrinsic versus extrinsic) by using data assimilation (ensemble-based or artificial intelligence techniques) with long-term satellite-based measurements of the shoreline position. The results of the postdoctoral project will include the development of a robust model for estimating multi-scale shoreline evolution. The ultimate goal that this model may become a reference used for operational modeling of coastal morphological evolution in littoral

communities.

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More details on the offer and the application process may be found here. 

Deadline for applications: 10/10/2025

Contact to submit your application (CV + letter of motivation): 

Nicolas Le Dantec (nicolas....@univ-brest.fr), Marissa Yates (marisa...@enpc.fr) 

Please share this offer with any potentially interested candidates.

Sincerely,

Marissa Yates, Nicolas Le Dantec, Imen Turki, Vanessya Laborie

Marissa Yates
Researcher LHSV
Tél. : 06 12 02 84 18
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