Postdoctoral Research Associate: Environmental/Climate Justice & Numerical Modeling

The Environmental Institute (EI) at the University of Virginia (UVA) is seeking a postdoctoral Research Associate to join its Climate Fellows Postdoc Program. The selected candidate will work with an interdisciplinary team of faculty mentors, researchers, and environmental justice leaders to realize the goals of a project aimed at developing a novel modeling framework to support community preferences in air quality decision-making. 

We are assembling a collaborative team of researchers and nonprofit advocates for a project aimed at changing how community organizations interact with the air quality decision-making process. Our objective is to create a chemical transport/machine learning model framework that informs and incorporates community preferences in a timely manner and with evidence from a policy-relevant chemical transport model for participation in public comment periods and other form of decision-making. We aim to ensure the relevance of air quality and climate policies to environmental justice. 

The postdoctoral research associate will contribute significantly to realizing the project’s Core Objectives, which include: 

Demonstrate the capabilities of a state-of-the-science chemical transport model in replicating neighborhood-level health-relevant pollutant disparities resulting from changes in emissions. 

Develop a machine learning model that replicates key features predicted by the chemical transport model in response to new policy interventions. 

Plan the engineering infrastructure required for a fast and accessible community chemical transport/machine learning model accessible via a web application on a laptop. 

Eligibility and Selection Process: 

General Expectations 

• Applicants must have received or will receive their doctoral degree by the beginning of their appointment; we prefer candidates who have received their degree within five years prior to the start of the appointment.  

• There is no citizenship requirement. UVA will help sponsor candidate visas during the postdoc period.  

• The successful Postdoctoral Research Associate will be appointed for one year with the possibility of second year funding, contingent on the successful completion of a first-year performance review.  

• Applicants seeking to be considered for the Postdoctoral Research Associate role for this project will be evaluated on three main criteria:  

1. the strength of their research.  

2. their ability to collaborate across disciplines; and  

3. their commitment to diversifying perspectives and voices in finding equitable solutions for climate adaptation and mitigation. 

Project-Specific Competencies: 

The Postdoctoral Research Associate will contribute to the research team’s efforts to develop models to inform air quality regulation that are accessible to residents with environmental justice concerns, and that can help reverse broader patterns of institutional and structural exclusion from decision-making.  

The ideal candidate must demonstrate the following research skills and competencies. 

• Familiarity with chemical transport modeling and/or machine learning.  

• Desire to apply skills to issues of environmental justice. 

Experience working with non-profit advocacy organizations in public health is not required; PIs, including a Houston, Texas-based non-profit advocacy organization working to reduce the public health impacts from air pollution, will provide mentoring in environmental justice and air quality decision-making. 

Climate Fellows Postdoctoral Model: 

Once selected, the Postdoctoral Research Associate will join a cohort of other Climate Fellows Program postdocs at UVA and will receive professional training, technical support, and computational infrastructure tailored to their project, for two (2) years. The postdoc will receive direct mentoring from three UVA faculty members in different disciplines, two faculty outside of UVA, and an environmental justice leader at a community-based organization to help them build cross-disciplinary fluency in support of their own research. They will join a network of faculty members from 30 departments in 12 schools across UVA focused on producing research and providing training that is both great and good at the intersection of climate change and human well-being.  

We partner with the Office of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs, UVA’s Career Center, and staff across the university to provide career development and extracurricular opportunities to student and postdoctoral faculty.  

Starting salary: $65,000/year