The University of Tennessee in Knoxville (UTK) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) seek a PhD-level graduate student to participate in a NASA-funded research project to assess the impacts of disturbance and land use change on the continental-scale carbon budget of North America. The student will be expected to lead the mapping component of the project, using the start-of-the-art in remotely-sensed data and tools to develop spatially- and temporally- explicit data sets on disturbance frequency, extent and severity. The primary focus of the project is to develop these data sets to drive ecological process models to assess disturbance-climate feedbacks; but opportunities also exist for the student to design research addressing other questions, including but not limited to modeling and prediction of insect outbreaks, fire emissions, and forest management and societal impacts.
The desired candidate will have a degree in ecology, forestry or other relevant environmental science discipline. A candidate with experience using software tools for Geographic Information Systems (e.g. ArcGIS) and satellite image analysis (e.g. ERDAS, ENVI) is highly desirable. Good communication and scientific writing skills are also of high importance.
The full-time graduate assistantship is available in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (http://eeb.bio.utk.edu/) at UTK and includes a tuition waiver, stipend (starting at ~$23,000 / year), and health insurance. The student will be required to enroll in the graduate school at UTK and the program will include collaboration with researchers at the Climate Change Science Institute (http://climatechangescience.ornl.gov/) at ORNL.
Interested candidates should send a letter of interest and résumé via e-mail to Daniel Hayes (hayesdj@ornl.gov). The position is available immediately, and the student should plan to begin their program no later than fall semester 2011.
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