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Jobs · OTHR · Maryland

Sources and Transformations of Organic Matter Across the Coastal Arctic River-to-Sea Continuum

ORAU · Greenbelt, MD · 2 mo ago
OTHRFull-time

About the role

The NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP) offers unique research opportunities to highly-talented scientists to engage in ongoing NASA research projects at a NASA Center, NASA Headquarters, or at a NASA-affiliated research institute. These one- to three-year fellowships are competitive and are designed to advance NASA’s missions in space science, Earth science, aeronautics, space operations, exploration systems, and astrobiology.

Responsibilities

  • Characterize the seasonal variability of particle source materials and evaluate their nutritional content across the river-to-sea continuum of Alaska’s North Slope.
  • Apply biomarker lipidomics and other biomolecules to quantify the sources and fluxes of particles originating from permafrost, watershed vegetation, autochthonous riverine production, and autochthonous marine production.
  • Assign food-quality metrics to particles.
  • Link particle source and food quality to coincident optical and phytoplankton measurements collected by collaborating investigators, including remote sensing reflectance, absorption, scattering, particle size distributions, and phytoplankton community composition.
  • Develop remote sensing approaches to track particle sources and food-quality characteristics.

Requirements

This study supports NASA’s FORTE (https://cce.nasa.gov/forte/) and Arctic-COLORS (https://cce.nasa.gov/cce/arctic_colors_report.html) field campaign investigations. Alaska’s North Slope and the broader coastal Arctic are experiencing rapid environmental change, including shifts in the timing of the spring freshet, permafrost thaw, seasonal landfast and offshore ice melt, and fall freeze-up. These changes have important implications for the Arctic marine ecosystem, which provides critical food resources for both marine mammals and local communities.

Qualifications

  • Ph.D. in marine sciences, oceanography, chemistry or closely related discipline.
  • Expertise with biogeochemical sample collection at sea, laboratory analysis, and data processing.
  • Experience with high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS), and/or LC-MS.

Skills

Not specified.

Benefits

Not specified.

Pay

Not specified.

Schedule

Not specified.

Contact Information

For questions about this opportunity, please email npp@orau.org.

Eligibility

  • U.S. Citizens;
  • U.S. Lawful Permanent Residents (LPR);
  • Foreign Nationals eligible for an Exchange Visitor J-1 visa status;
  • Applicants for LPR, asylees, or refugees in the U.S. at the time of application with 1) a valid EAD card and 2) I-485 or I-589 forms in pending status.

Advisors

  • Antonio Mannino: Antonio.Mannino-1@nasa.gov (301) 286-0182

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