Yes, seriously!

I have finally worked my way through the necessary formalities required by UWA to advertise a 2-year postdoc to work on structural matroid theory; the advert itself is on the UWA careers page (click on “Academic Vacancies” and then the job itself is #3504 Research Associate).

This is funded by the ARC Discovery Grant “Exact Structure in Graphs and Matroids” that I got last year with Geoff Whittle and Dillon Mayhew from Wellington. The basic aim is to get exact structural descriptions of certain classes of binary matroids and graphs – the prototype for this is our paper on the binary matroids with no $M(K_{3,3})$ minor (see the relevant Memoirs page).

Our real aim is to give a similar description for the binary matroids with no $M(K_5)$ minor, but this seems like it is going to be very difficult. While it seemed like a nice ambitious problem to put on a grant application, I’m hoping we haven’t over-extended ourselves now it’s time to deliver!

Given that we didn’t get fully funded, we’ve only got 2 years of postdoc time to offer, and so we really need to get someone who can hit the ground running.  Essentially this means someone with a strong understanding of minors, minor-closed classes, excluded minors and the associated structural theories — ideally for binary matroids, but at least for graphs.