Postdoctoral Associate – MIT Vice President for Research
Please submit materials to Job #22484 at academicjobsonline.
The MIT Climate Grand Challenges competition identified five Flagship Projects that seek to tackle big problems in the global response to climate change. We are looking for five postdocs to join the “Bringing Computation to the Climate Challenge” (BC3) flagship project. The goal of this grand challenge is to develop software to provide accurate and actionable scientific information to decision-makers to inform the most effective mitigation and adaptation strategies. We envision a novel platform that leapfrogs existing climate decision support tools by leveraging new computing languages, advances in computational and data sciences to improve the efficiency and accuracy of climate models, quantify their uncertainty, and addresses the trade-off between performance and computation time with attention to industry and government stakeholder needs. You can find more information about our project in our website (https://climategrandchallenges.mit.edu/flagship-projects/bringing-computation-to-the-climate-challenge/) and in this article (https://news.mit.edu/2022/computing-our-climate-future-0413.)
As a postdoctoral scholar, you will collaborate with a dynamic, multi-disciplinary team of scientists, engineers, and applied mathematicians, spanning many MIT departments–AeroAstro (Lead Prof. Youssef Marzouk), Earth Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (Lead Prof. Raffaele Ferrari), Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (Lead Prof. Daniela Rus), Institute for Data Systems and Society (Lead Prof. Noelle Selin), Materials Science and Engineering (Lead Prof. Elsa Olivetti), Mathematics (Lead Prof. Alan Edelman), Mechanical Engineering (Lead Prof. Themis Sapsis)—and the Schwartzman College of Computing. Postdocs will work with a designated mentor and co-mentor and can contribute to various aspects of the project, including but not limited to building and prototyping the sea ice and carbon cycle components of the climate model that will be used to make climate projections; developing and testing the new software platform; developing robust and flexible procedures to derive simple surrogate models trained with the full ESM to predict a subset of climate-relevant variables of interest for specific applications; and/or working with stakeholders to enhance the utility of model applications.
REQUIRED: a PhD, in atmospheric or oceanic sciences, climate sciences, atmospheric chemistry, applied mathematics, engineering, statistics, or related interdisciplinary fields. Experience in computational modeling, working with high-performance parallel computing, demonstrated effective written and verbal communication skills, and working in interdisciplinary teams is highly desired.
For additional information about the positions, please contact Professors Raffaele Ferrari and Noelle Selin at bc3jobs@mit.edu. We strongly encourage women and under-represented minorities to apply. Applications with a curriculum vitae, a one-page statement of research interests, and the email contacts for three references (not letters at this stage) should be submitted to https://academicjobsonline.org/ MIT is an equal employment opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment and will not be discriminated against on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, veteran status, or disability. Review of applications will begin September 10 and will continue until the positions are filled.
