Research Fellow in Business Models for Digital Circular Economy

This is an exciting full-time opportunity to join our team, contribute to impactful research and develop valuable skills to build your career. The successful candidate will contribute to the three-year project "Robotic triage for value retention in a circular economy (RoboTriage)" funded by Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). About the Role Responsibilities for the successful candidate will include:

• Conducting research, developing objectives and delivering outputs independently, under the guidance of the project leader.
• Collecting and analysing data using methods such as case studies, interviews, surveys and literature reviews.
• Undertaking management/administration arising from research.
• Presenting and disseminating research findings as outputs, including drafting academic publications or parts thereof, posters at conferences, seminars, or workshops.
• Contributing to research- and teaching- related activities and administration.
• Supervising students on research-related work and guiding PhD students where appropriate.
• Contributing to writing bids for research funding.
• Dealing with problems that may affect the achievement of research objectives and deadlines.
• Promoting equality and diversity, acting as a role model, and fostering an inclusive working culture., The successful candidate will be hosted at the Sustainable Business Group of the Centre for Strategy, Entrepreneurship and Sustainability, while being supported by the Centre for Logistics, Procurement & Supply Chain Management.
About the Project RoboTriage is led by researchers from University of Birmingham, Cranfield University, and the Manufacturing Technology Centre, working closely with over 12 industrial partners. The project will address one of the most critical challenges in circular economy (CE) landscape: many CE activities fail to fully capture the potential value of products, components, and materials. Rather than being repaired, reused, or remanufactured, a significant number of products end up in mixed waste streams and are recycled, which is the least valuable end-of-life CE option, leading to substantial loss of residual value. The project proposes circularity triage, the process of rapidly examining products, components and parts to determine their best CE option. The project will develop robotic systems that can perform circularity triage by capturing the health condition data of used products, allowing a swift evaluation that recommends the highest-value CE options to avoid mixed waste streams. The Cranfield team will lead the CE theme, investigating the science of circularity triage, developing triage criteria and circularity scoring system, modelling and optimizing sustainable value and developing business models for circularity triage.

You will have a PhD in relevant research fields or equivalent qualifications. You will also have strong skills in qualitative and quantitative research, and you will be able to provide evidence of independent contribution to research design and execution. You should have strong academic writing, project management, and analytical skills, and the ability to communicate complex information clearly. You should be able to demonstrate effective collaboration with academic and industrial partners, and fluency in relevant techniques and methods, with the ability to develop new ones. You will also show an understanding of broader management/administration processes, and will be highly organized, detail-oriented, and capable of coordinating work to avoid conflict or duplication.

As a specialist postgraduate university, Cranfield's world-class expertise, large-scale facilities and unrivalled industry partnerships create leaders in technology and management globally. Learn more about Cranfield and our unique impact here. Our Values and Commitments Our shared, stated values help to define who we are and underpin everything we do: Ambition; Impact; Respect; and Community. Find out more here. We aim to create and maintain a culture in which everyone can work and study together and realise their full potential. We are a Disability Confident Employer and proud members of the Stonewall Diversity Champions Programme. We are committed to actively exploring flexible working options for each role and have been ranked in the Top 30 family friendly employers in the UK by the charity Working Families. Find out more about our key commitments to Equality, Diversity and Inclusion and Flexible Working here. Working Arrangements Collaborating and connecting are integral to so much of what we do. Our Working Arrangements Framework provides many staff with the opportunity to flexibly combine on-site and remote working, where job roles allow, balancing the needs of our community of staff, students, clients and partners.