Earth Fellow: Climate challenge impact

Grade UE05: £29,588- £33,951 per Annum Pro Rata (£16.21- £18.60 per hour) 
Edinburgh Earth Initiative & School of Engineering
Part Time: 9 hours per week
Fixed-term: 6 months 

The Opportunity: 

The Failure Modes of Engineering (FeME) Network is a global initiative reimagining engineering to better serve society. We work to create inclusive, resilient, and adaptable approaches that address climate change and biodiversity loss, amplifying the voices of women and underrepresented groups.

FeME is seeking a postgraduate-level Earth Fellow to transform the rich outputs of the FeME Climate Challenge event into accessible, organised, and meaningful insights. The Fellow will clean, sort, and summarise participant data, session outputs, and transcriptions, ensuring accuracy, consistency, and ethical data handling. They will create clear systems for organising quantitative and qualitative information, produce visual and written summaries, and draft reports to support FeME's evaluation, communications, and research. This role is an opportunity to shape how diverse voices and experiences inform climate-conscious engineering education, practice, and impact.

As an Earth Fellow, you will be joining a diverse, fun and dynamic team of researchers, students and staff all working together to address the global climate emergency. As part of the Earth Fellows programme, you will have access to co-working space, exciting networking and personal development opportunities and opportunities to contribute towards partnerships and solutions for climate change on a global scale.

Earth Fellows work on individual and team-based projects which contribute to the University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh Earth Initiative's work on climate change research-led impact, innovation, engagement, and teaching.

This post will be appointed at Grade UE05, step 1 which is £29,588 per annum, pro rata (£16.21 per hour).

Earth Fellowships are only open to current postgraduate (masters-level) and PhD students at the University of Edinburgh based in the UK. Please do not apply if you are not a current University of Edinburgh student.

Your skills and attributes for success:

•    Current University of Edinburgh postgraduate (masters-level) student in the '25/'26 academic year. 

•    Strong organisational skills and attention to detail. 

•    Experience with spreadsheets, data cleaning, and qualitative coding. 

•    Ability to summarise complex information clearly and accessibly. 

•    Familiarity with visualisation tools (e.g., Excel, Canva, Tableau, or similar). 

•    Interest in climate change, inclusivity, and interdisciplinary research.

Click here to view the full project brief for the Earth Fellow: Climate challenge impact including key tasks and deliverables (opens browser in new tab).

Click here to view the general Earth Fellow job description (opens browser in new tab). Please refer to both the project brief and job description when outlining your skills and experience in your application.

Application Information:

Please ensure you include the following documents in your application:

- CV

- Cover letter

As a valued member of our team, you can expect: 

• A competitive salary  
• An exciting, positive, creative, challenging and rewarding place to work. 
• To be part of a diverse and vibrant international community.
• Comprehensive Staff Benefits, such as a generous holiday entitlement, a defined benefits pension scheme, staff discounts, family-friendly initiatives, and flexible work options. Check out the full list on our staff benefits page (opens in a new tab) and use our reward calculator to discover the total value of your pay and benefits. 

Championing equality, diversity and inclusion

The University of Edinburgh holds a Silver Athena SWAN award in recognition of our commitment to advance gender equality in higher education. We are members of the Race Equality Charter and we are also Stonewall Scotland Diversity Champions, actively promoting LGBT equality. 

Prior to any employment commencing with the University you will be required to evidence your right to work in the UK. Further information is available on our right to work webpages (opens new browser tab).

On this occasion the University will not consider applicants requiring sponsorship for this role. International workers will therefore only be able to take up this role if they can demonstrate an alternative right to work in the UK.

Key dates to note

The closing date for applications is 5th January 2026.

Unless stated otherwise the closing time for applications is 11:59pm GMT. If you are applying outside the UK the closing time on our adverts automatically adjusts to your browsers local time zone. 

Interviews dates to be confirmed.