NASA Postdoctoral Program - Astrophysics of the Dusty Universe

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. This specific opportunity focuses on astrophysics of the dusty universe at JPL, exploring how dust affects astronomical observations across all wavelengths. Research opportunities span theoretical developments on dust thermodynamics, dynamics, optical properties, and statistical inference of dust properties, particularly relating to past, present, and future NASA missions including JWST, SPHEREx, SOFIA, Herschel, Planck, Spitzer, WISE, Euclid, Roman, CMB-S4, and PICO. The position involves understanding dust as both a diagnostic tool for studying the lifecycle of gas and metals in galaxies and as a challenge for cosmological analyses, including polarized emission from dust affecting CMB observations.