A PhD scholarship is available within the Conservation Biology group of the University of Newcastle’s School of Environmental and Life Sciences for a student to study the prey preferences of dingoes, red foxes and cats under the supervision of Associate Professor Matt Hayward.

A PhD scholarship is available within the Conservation Biology group of the University of Newcastle’s School of Environmental and Life Sciences for a student to study the prey preferences of dingoes, red foxes and cats under the supervision of Associate Professor Matt Hayward.

Matt has pioneered the field of predator preferential predation following his work in Africa, which then evolved via collaborations to exploring Eurasian and American predators. This work shows that each large predator has a limited number of prey species upon which it prefers to hunt from within the prey community, and there exists a preferred and accessible prey weight range that determines which species a predator will hunt and kill.

This PhD will expand that research into Australian predators. The PhD also has scope to use Matt’s extensive database of worldwide predator prey preferences to investigate some big questions in ecology involving optimal foraging theory, functional redundancy, mesopredator suppression and/or functional responses.

Scholarship details

University of Newcastle Research Scholarship: $27,082 p.a. (2018 rate), indexed in January each year for three and a half years.

Eligibility

This scholarship is suited to a student with an honours degree and an interest, and ideally experience, with mathematical modelling and predators.

Visit the higher degree by research scholarships website for further information about eligibility criteria - http://www.newcastle.edu.au/research-and-innovation/graduate-research/phd-and-research-degrees/scholarships

For more information or to apply, click 'View details' below.