NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellowship: Assessing Trends and Variability in Terrestrial Ecosystem Photosynthesis

The NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP) offers unique research opportunities to highly-talented scientists to engage in ongoing NASA research projects. This specific fellowship opportunity focuses on investigating coupled carbon-water cycle interactions and bioclimatic controls on ecosystem productivity at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The postdoctoral fellow, mentored by Dr. Nicholas Parazoo, will work on understanding how the global terrestrial carbon sink will evolve under future climate change and its impact on atmospheric CO2 concentrations. The research addresses one of the most pressing questions in carbon cycle science: how increased uptake due to earlier spring onset might offset summer drying induced CO2 losses, and how these processes are coupled through carbon-water cycle interactions. The fellow will collaborate with scientists at JPL's Earth Science Division and the Carbon Cycle and Ecosystems group, as well as Caltech researchers, to exploit multi-scale satellite, airborne, and field observations with state-of-the-art land and atmosphere models. These competitive fellowships are designed to advance NASA's missions in space science, Earth science, aeronautics, space operations, exploration systems, and astrobiology, offering one- to three-year appointments.