NASA Postdoctoral Program - Observing Supermassive Black Holes at X-rays and Other Wavelengths

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 research to study electromagnetic emission from accretion driven by supermassive black holes, and from supermassive black hole environments. Research is heavily driven by X-ray observations from space-based observatories such as Chandra, XMM-Newton, IXPE, NuSTAR and more, but also takes a broad, multi-wavelength approach including ultraviolet, optical, and infrared imaging and spectroscopy, particularly by Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), as well as radio. These observations probe a variety of spatial scales and physical conditions. Areas of particular interest include high angular resolution studies of nearby active galactic nuclei, X-ray and ultraviolet spectroscopy of stars tidally disrupted by supermassive black holes, X-ray polarimetry of blazar jets and other active galactic nuclei processes, and an extremely deep Chandra survey within the JWST continuous viewing zone. There is also interest in advancing new technologies and concepts for space-based X-ray observatories.