NASA Postdoctoral Program - Magnetic Fields and Cosmic Rays in the Milky Way Interstellar Medium

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 conducting a research program that combines modeling of the Galactic magnetic field (GMF), cosmic rays (CRs), and synchrotron emission. The research will utilize the publicly available IMAGINE infrastructure designed to explore the likelihood space of magnetic field models while including constraints from existing tracers such as radio synchrotron emission, polarized microwave dust emission, and Faraday rotation measures. Applicants may propose research that compares different GMF models in the literature with a self-consistent Bayesian framework, or expand the analysis to include the likelihood space of cosmic ray injection and propagation models. This research will improve understanding of the magnetized interstellar medium as well as Galactic foregrounds and the dynamics of various astrophysical processes. The position is located at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, with Dr. Tess Jaffe serving as the advisor.