Our group works within the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), a public institution, and candidates for all contracts we may offer are selected from the CSIC job bank. If you want to work with us, or with any other group within the CSIC, we encourage you to register for the CSIC job bank. We understand that the process may pose some difficulties, especially for foreigners because application for degree/title homologation is necessary. We offer all our help in case case of need, just contact us.

Currently, we have no job offer as an associated project contract.

In any case, we are always interested in expanding our research lines, specially thinking of future researchers. Thus, we propose several PhD thesis topics to apply for external funding (FPU, Foundations, etc.). Again, if you are interested in any of the proposed topics, we encourage you to contact us for more details.

Proposed PhD Thesis projects.

1. Title: “Orbital observation of the Moon’s geodetic parameters from co-registration of Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) profiles”

• Summary: Constraints on the interior of the Moon can shed crucial insights into its formation and ultimately the evolution of the Earth-Moon system. Estimates of the Moon’s periodic surface tidal deformation and time-varying lunar orientation provide unique evidence of its inner workings. The former is especially related to the structure and rheology of the deep structure and the latter is directly tied to the Moon’s moments-of-inertia. We plan to apply innovative approaches to Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) profiles to perform independent analysis of the aforementioned geodetic parameters.

2. Title: “Inter-annual climate dynamics of Mars from thickness variation of the seasonal deposits at its polar regions.”

• Summary: The seasonal deposition and sublimation of CO2 snow and frost in the polar regions constitute a major element in the Martian volatile cycle. Although the lateral evolution of seasonal deposits has been extensively mapped using cameras and thermal emission spectrometers, their large-scale thickness evolution has only been examined by using height profiles acquired by the Mars Orbiter Laser altimeter (MOLA). Unfortunately, various factors could bias the MOLA-derived estimates. More importantly, the MOLA dataset is temporally limited to 1999 and 2001, a little more than one Mars year, preventing its use to examine inter-annual climate dynamics of Mars. We have conducted an experiment measuring shadows variations of ice blocks resulting in the successful determination of the polar cap thickness variation. We propose to extend this experiment.