Postdoctoral Fellow in Ecological Statistics in University of Notre Dame

Duties & Responsibilities: A postdoctoral fellowship in statistical methods applied to paleoecological problems is available at the University of Notre Dame. The position is part of PALEON, a PaleoEcological Observatory Network to Assess Terrestrial Ecosystem Models, and is supported in part be Notre Dame's Environmental Change Initiative (ND-ECI). PALEON is an initiative to statistically estimate changes in forest composition in the northeastern U.S. over the past 2000 years using paleoecological data and to assimilate these estimates into ecosystem models. The postdoctoral fellow will lead the development of statistical models, based on spatial statistics, state space, and data assimilation methods, for the initiative, interacting with statisticians, paleoecologists, paleoclimatologists, and ecosystem modelers. The fellow will be supervised by Dr. Jason McLachlan at Notre Dame and Dr. Chris Paciorek at UC Berkeley, with extensive interaction with other PALEON team members. Specific modeling challenges may include spatio-temporal modeling of paleoecological data, state-space modeling informed by ecological models, modeling uncertainty in radiocarbon dating, and spatial modeling of vegetation based on colonial settlement-era historical records. PALEON is an interdisciplinary research group of paleoecologists, statisticians, and ecosystem modelers working together to study how climate variations shape forest dynamics across a range of timescales. Specific goals include developing a coherent inferential framework with rigorous estimates of uncertainty for paleoecological data, applying these techniques to reconstruct variations in forested ecosystems for the last 2000 years from the Great Lakes to New England, and then assimilating the results into a suite of regional-scale ecosystem models. Postdoctoral researchers will work closely with each other and other members of the PALEON team towards these goals. Further details about PALEON may be found at www.paleonproject.org . The position is available for a two-year period, subject to annual performance review.

Position Qualifications: Ph.D. in statistics or a related field. Strong applicants will possess a background in Bayesian statistical modeling, especially spatial modeling, state space modeling, or data assimilation. Applicants must be interested in working at the interface of statistics and ecology.

Salary Range: Competitive

Benefits: All benefits associated with full-time employment at the University of Notre Dame

Web Site: www.nd.edu

Application Address: Please email your CV and a cover letter with the names and contact information of three references to Jason McLachlan (jmclachl@nd.edu).

Contact Email: jmclachl@nd.edu

Application Deadline: We will consider applications on a rolling deadline. Funding is available for an immediate start, but we will consider start dates as late as summer 2011.