NASA Postdoctoral Program - Weak Gravitational Lensing and Galaxy Clustering as Probes of Dark Matter and Dark Energy

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 weak gravitational lensing research, where the sizes and shapes of background galaxies are slightly distorted by foreground dark matter, serving as one of the premier tools of precision cosmology. The research involves measuring the small coherent distortion of distant galaxies to provide information about the amount and distribution of dark matter in the Universe, with measurements of the time evolution of dark matter structures serving as a powerful probe of dark energy. Projects include work with both ground- and space-based data, serving as precursors to ambitious surveys planned for the 2020s, including NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, the ESA/NASA Euclid mission, the SuperBIT balloon mission, and the ground-based Vera Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). The research also includes measurement of the clustering and velocities of galaxies in 3 dimensional space, which encompasses Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) and Redshift Space Distortions (RSD) as another powerful probe of dark matter and dark energy.