Trinity is Ireland's leading university and is ranked 75th in the world (QS World University Rankings ****).
Founded in ****, the University is steeped in history with a reputation for excellence in education, research, and innovation, which has been inspiring generations of thinkers for over 400 years.
T. Trinity College Dublin is home to an historic 'library of plants' – an herbarium – of immense cultural, historical, and scientific value.
The herbarium contains approximately 500,000 dried, pressed and identified plants that have been preserved within large leather-bound books dating back to the age of global exploration (including Captain Cook's voyages *********), and as individual meticulously labelled sheets with historic inscriptions of their collector's name, place, and date of collection.
These plant specimens contain irreplaceable scientific information that can be mined using advanced scientific techniques to track trends in global biodiversity, to examine the impacts of climate change on our natural world and to inform conservation efforts.
The herbarium has recently received funding from the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage for an ambitious, eight-year project that aims to transform Trinity's herbarium into a modern, plant science research laboratory and to digitise and image our specimens, so they can be made available online to the global research opportunity.
One year into the project, we have successfully databased 60,000 specimens and imaged 40,000.
We are seeking a dedicated and passionate research assistant to assist the Herbarium Digitisation Coordinator to continue digitisation efforts at an increased pace within Trinity College Dublin herbarium.
We also offer the opportunity for the candidate to present a passion project to work on one day a week alongside regular digitation efforts.
This can be in many forms (i.e. Specific plant group of interest, collector, location, books etc).
Successful candidates will include potential ideas in their application.
Application Procedure