NASA Postdoctoral Program - Pre-Fire Burnable Material Assessment and Post-Fire Damage Assessment from Multi-Sensor Remote Sensing

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 wildfire research, developing decision-ready products for pre-fire burnable material assessment and post-fire damage and recovery assessment. The postdoctoral researcher will join a multi-phase wildfire research effort that integrates multi-sensor remote sensing, environmental covariates, and scalable data science workflows. The work addresses the increasing risks wildfires pose to ecosystems, infrastructure, and communities by characterizing burnable material and landscape conditions before fires and quantifying vegetation and biomass changes after fires. The research combines satellite and airborne observations across optical, thermal, radar, and lidar modalities with modern statistical and machine-learning approaches to enable robust mapping of fuels, assessment of burn severity, estimation of biomass and structural loss, and tracking of post-fire recovery trajectories.