Community Engagement Coordinator

About us

We are seeking to recruit a two-year full-time Community Engagement Coordinator (CEC) within the Department of Earth Sciences, Faculty of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at University College London (UCL). The CEC will join Palaeoverse through the Software Sustainability Institute funded project ‘Converting Users to Contributors: Enabling Sustainable Maintenance and Development of Palaeoverse’.

Palaeoverse (https://palaeoverse.org/) is an organisation aiming to unite the palaeontological community through shared resources, agreed standards, and a collective commitment to improving reproducibility in palaeontological research. The organisation began in 2022 when a group of early-career researchers recognised a common challenge: many of us were independently developing similar workflows for cleaning and preparing palaeontological data due to a lack of standardised tools and protocols, leading to duplicated work that was difficult to reproduce.

In response, we came together to develop the palaeoverse R package—a toolkit designed to streamline data preparation and exploration in palaeontological research. Since then, Palaeoverse has evolved into a formally organised initiative with a growing scope. The organisation has expanded into a full software ecosystem, additionally running training workshops, producing community resources, and fostering spaces for networking.

About the role

Employment is project time bound and will commence on the 1st of March 2026, for a duration of 24 months, concluding on the 28th of February 2028. The duration of this position may be extended if additional funding becomes available (e.g. sought through competitive-funding schemes). The CEC will be based in the Department of Earth Sciences at UCL throughout the duration of the project but will be required to travel both nationally and internationally to carry out project-specific activities.

The main responsibility of the CEC will be to engage the palaeontological community, build a contributor network, and support capacity building in research software development and maintenance. To this end, the CEC will lead organisation and running of workshops, hackathons, coworking sessions, and mentorship initiatives focused on software development and maintenance. These will be delivered both in-person (nationally and internationally) and online. They will also contribute to re-defining Palaeoverse's governance structure, as well as the development of resources to foster community contributions and the management of community spaces (e.g. Google Group, BlueSky, YouTube Channel). In addition to this, the successful candidate will have the opportunity to get involved in research applications of the software toolkits. These will be carried out with an international team of project partners. The post is funded by a grant that covers travel to national and international conference s which the successful applicant would be expected to attend and present at.

About you

Candidates will have a university degree (e.g. BSc, MSc, or PhD) in a related field (e.g. earth sciences, biological sciences, social sciences), or equivalent, relevant experience, and a proven ability to establish and maintain effective working relationships with a diverse range of individuals, partners, and stakeholders.

Experience of coordinating (or supporting in coordination of) community or education initiatives, and experience in event organisation, administration, scheduling, and management logistics is essential.

Strong organisational capabilities and an ability to coordinate project work to agreed standards and objectives is also essential.

What we offer

As well as the exciting opportunities this role presents, we also offer some great benefits some of which are below:

Visit https://www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/reward-and-benefits to find out more.

Customer advert reference: B04-06998

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