Heriot-Watt University has established a reputation for world-class teaching and leading-edge, relevant research, which has made it one of the top UK universities for innovation, business and industry.
Heriot-Watt University has five campuses: three in the UK (Edinburgh, Scottish Borders and Orkney), one in Dubai and one in Malaysia. The University offers a highly distinctive range of degree programmes in the specialist areas of science, engineering, design, business and languages. Heriot-Watt is also Scotland's most international university, boasting the largest international student cohort.

About our Research Team
The position holders will join a team of multiple RAs and PhD students working on decarbonization and the finance of the green transition.  The work package on which they will be tasked is well defined and distinct from existing work and provide added value to existing projects.  There will be well defined outputs and expectations of performance for the duration of these short appointments.  The projects will work in collaboration with an industry partner and receive the endorsement of the Scottish Financial Risk Academy.
Dr George Tzougas MACS and Dr Dimitris Christopoulos EBS will jointly supervise the project RAs towards data cleaning, data analysis and writing of academic outputs.

Detailed Description
The carbon market has been recognized as an effective platform for the international community to solve climate problems and reduce pollution emissions. • Long-term goals for developing regional or nationwide Emission Trading System (ETS) would be to create a larger, integrated, and more liquid carbon market. • Also, there is a unique opportunity for the (re)insurance and alternative risk transfer industries to provide the necessary capital to achieve scale in the voluntary carbon market via securitisation of carbon emissions. • Understanding the pricing mechanism of the carbon market based on efficient forecasting methods can address the aforementioned. • The main focus of this research study is to construct hybrid Machine Learning-Time Series models for capturing the stylized characteristics of the carbon market and for improving efficiency and robustness for forecasting carbon price.

Key Duties and Responsibilities
Two research assistants will be hired to help Dr George Tzougas (PI) and Prof Dimitris Christopoulos (Co-PI) to build hybrid statistical -machine learning models to examine the spill over effect between the EU and UK carbon markets by investigating how EU carbon prices can impact the UK ones. For this purpose, we use continuous futures contracts from both EU and UK data sets.

Education, Qualifications and Experience

Essential Criteria
Two research assistants who will be hired to work in this project should have an excellent grounding in:
actuarial mathematics/ financial mathematics  (position 1)
computational statistics and data science (position 2)

Also, they should have completed or be near completion of their PhD thesis.

Desirable Criteria
They should have published in actuarial and/or financial and/or computational statistics journals.

‘How to Apply’
Applications can be submitted up to midnight (UK time) on date.

Include the specific agreed submission format for the role, an example: Please must submit via the Heriot-Watt on-line recruitment system (1) Cover letter describing their interest and suitability for the post; (2) Full CV that includes the list of publications (3) Research and teaching statements, showing their strengths in one or more of the research areas above.

For informal discussions about the position or the project, please contact Dr George Tzougas.