Resilience and Sustainability Science Postdoctoral Fellowship

Overview

Resilience and Sustainability Science Postdoctoral Fellowship

Life on a Sustainable Planet aims to promote evidence-based decision-making, working in concert with local communities to address the climate crisis.

Life on a Sustainable Planet will use the Institution’s more than 175-year history of scientific research and data gathering across a global network of research centers, its expansive museum collection, and its diverse set of exhibits and educational programs to produce, curate and communicate evidence-based strategies for adapting to and mitigating the impacts of climate change to the public. The Institution will pioneer new technologies to collect environmental data, develop new platforms to analyze and share these data and work with partners and communities to inform conservation action.

Life on a Sustainable Planet, in part, is supported by the Adrienne Arsht Community-Based Resilience Solutions Initiative, which in turn, is funding a cohort of resilience fellows, working across several Smithsonian units and with outside partners, to use our collections to better understand resilience in nature and in human communities, and to strengthen connections between our collections and the latest scientific innovations. In this “living laboratory,” scientists will study how we can use fundamental knowledge of nature-based resilience solutions in ecological systems such as tropical rainforests or oceans to help create resilient communities and to devise and field-test solutions.

Through the Resilience and Sustainability Fellowship, the Smithsonian seeks to support up to five post-doctoral fellows as they conduct independent research in support of the Smithsonian’s goals to understand and expand resilience. These fellows will be able to leverage the Smithsonian’s resources, including its scientists, collections, exhibits, and data sets, to advance scientific understanding resilience and sustainability in either marine or terrestrial systems.

Stipend:

Recipients will receive a stipend of $62,000 per year for Postdoctoral Fellows. Stipends are prorated for periods of less than 24 months. A maximum research allowance of $10,000 is available for the fellowship period.

Eligibility

_You can learn more about this opportunity by visiting the funder's website._

* Applicants for Postdoctoral Fellowships must have or will have received the Ph.D. by the time the fellowship begins.
* Applicants must propose to conduct research in residence.
* All proposals are welcome, but proposals should focus on the resilience and sustainability connecting complex marine or terrestrial systems (e.g., forests, freshwater systems, soils, etc.) with the people who depend on these systems and the services these systems provide.
* By resilience, we mean the ability of people and nature to respond and/or adapt to external stressors.
* As such, proposals must address at least two of the following:
* Socio-environmental external stressors as drivers of change
* Socio-environmental factors that influence the ability to adapt or that convey resilience
* Adaptive strategies
* Adaptive responses/outcomes
* Importantly, proposals must also demonstrate that the research:
* is use-inspired;
* clearly relates to or informs solutions to current global environmental challenges; and
* includes a diversity, equity, access, and inclusion (DEAI) component.
* Applications may be focused on any number of a broad set of natural or social science disciplines inclusive of, but no limited to:
* animal behavior,
* anthropology,
* archeology,
* chemical ecology,
* conservation biology,
* ecology,
* economics,
* evolutionary biology,
* functional genomics,
* geography microbial ecology,
* molecular biology,
* marine biology,
* natural history,
* neurobiology,
* paleoecology,
* paleontology,
* physiology,
* political economy,
* political ecology,
* public policy,
* sensory ecology,
* sociology,
* soils sciences,
* taxonomy,
* etc.