Postdoctoral Researcher in Farm Animal Behaviour and Welfare

Postdoctoral Researcher in Farm Animal Behaviour and Welfare

SLU - Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences

Uppsala, Sweden

About the position

The research with pigs focuses on:

Investigating long-term effects of providing piglets with early-life freedom of choice in how and what they forage. This work explores impacts on resilience, cognitive development, behaviour, stress physiology, health, microbiota-related functions, and production outcomes up to slaughter.

Setting up a Living Lab to co-develop practical feeding-enrichment solutions with farmers and stakeholders, implementing these strategies on commercial farms, and evaluating piglet welfare, health, microbiota, behavioural, and economic impacts in real-world settings.

Together, the projects address a central challenge in commercial pig production: how to enable natural foraging motivations, support gut–brain development, increase stress resilience, and reduce welfare and health problems during and after weaning. This position offers an exceptional opportunity to combine experimental animal welfare research, field-based living lab development, behavioural and physiological data collection, and stakeholder-driven innovation. It also offers the chance to maximise publications by becoming involved in the analysis and writing of scientific papers from other behaviour and welfare projects.

Tasks

Your main responsibilities will include:

• Conduct behavioural observations, welfare assessments, cognitive testing (e.g., novel object recognition, problem-solving, attention bias), and stress-physiology sampling in longitudinal studies following piglets from early life until slaughter.
• Analyse health, production and welfare outcomes (growth, lesions, diarrhoea, tail biting, resilience indicators, BDNF/IGF-1, immune parameters).
• Help integrate measures of brain plasticity, stress resilience, and affective indicators with behavioural findings.
• Facilitate workshops, interviews and co-creation activities with farmers, veterinarians, feed companies, advisors and other stakeholders.
• Support implementation of choice-driven feeding and enrichment strategies on commercial farms, in collaboration with project partners.
• Collect behavioural, welfare, microbiota, and production data in real farm environments.
• Work with economists and advisors to structure cost–benefit analyses of enrichment strategies.
• Structure and analyse large behavioural and physiological datasets.
• Lead or co-author scientific manuscripts for high-quality peer-reviewed journals.
• Present findings at scientific conferences and stakeholder meetings.
• Contribute to outreach material such as infographics, videos and farmer-oriented reports.

Your profile

We seek a candidate who is passionate about improving farm animal welfare through rigorous science and collaborative innovation.

Eligibility Requirements:

• PhD in animal science, ethology, animal welfare, veterinary science, animal physiology, or a closely related field.
• Strong skills in behavioural data collection and welfare assessment.
• Strong statistical skills (R preferred).
• Practical experience working with farm animals, ideally pigs.
• Ability to independently plan and conduct research, manage fieldwork, and collaborate within multidisciplinary teams.
• Excellent spoken and written English.
• Experience in scientific publishing.
• B-driving licence (due to farm travel requirements).

Desirable Skills:

• Cognitive and/or emotional assessment in animals (e.g.e, behavioural tests, attention bias).
• Stress-physiology sampling or analysis (e.g., cortisol, ACTH, immune markers).
• Field-based studies on commercial farms.
• Co-creation methodologies or living-lab approaches.
• Spoken and written Swedish.
• Interest in stakeholder engagement, applied welfare innovation, and translational research.

The position is intended for a junior researcher, and we are primarily looking for individuals who obtained their doctoral degree no more than three years ago.