Great Basin Fire Portal

A postdoctoral research opportunity in social science is available with US Forest Service (USFS), Pacific Northwest Research Station (PNW) in Seattle, Washington, or Portland or Corvallis, Oregon. This opportunity may start remotely due to the ongoing pandemic.

Lee Cerveny, Research Social Scientist, is looking to fill a position for a one-year postdoctoral research fellow to conduct research on diversity, equity, and inclusion in the USFS. This work could potentially expand to include agency interactions with communities, partners, other governmental agencies including tribes, or with resource users.  The person is being hired through the U.S. Department of Energy ORISE fellowship program and will work directly with a team of social scientists in Seattle.  

This post-doc begins August 2021 as a virtual position and will be completed by August 2022. The team seeks someone with strong social science research skills (both quantitative and qualitative would be ideal) and an interest in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). And, it would be beneficial if that person had a background or interest in institutional analysis, industrial or organizational sociology/psychology, business, or public administration. The postdoc will work with the team to develop 1 or 2 short-term studies that could be completed within a year to explore the role of public agency culture as well as the nature of work or the culture of that profession (wildland firefighting, forestry, law enforcement) and how that may play a role in shaping the work environment. This builds off some of the team’s previous work (in review) related to gender, diversity and inclusion in wildland firefighting in the Northwest.

The Department of Interior's (DOI's) Office of Wildland Fire (OWF) and Office of Policy Analysis (PPA) are organizing the DOI Wildland Fire Workshop, to be held online in the fall of 2021. This workshop builds on the momentum of Reclamation's Wildfire Research Needs Workshop (led by John Whitler on April 6 and 7, 2021), and is an opportunity for those interested in issues related to wildland fire at Interior to come together for networking, learning, and discussing current issues.

Call for Presenters

The draft agenda includes "lightning rounds" to allow participants to learn about current work going on at Interior. Lightning-round presentations are brief summaries of in-progress work or completed projects. Please use the survey link below to send a brief description of your research by Friday, April 30.

Call for Session Facilitators

The draft agenda also includes two working sessions, where participants will be breaking into several smaller groups to address various aspects of how wildland fire intersects with (1) climate change, and (2) racial equity and disadvantaged communities. If you would be interested in serving as a chairperson or note-taker for any of these groups, please use the survey link below to let the workshop coordinators know by Friday, April 30.

The Department of Applied Ecology at North Carolina State University, in collaboration with the Department of Statistics, the North Carolina Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, and the USGS Southeast Climate Adaptation Science Center, will be hiring a Postdoctoral Research Scholar in data science to assist with efforts to develop a prototype early warning system for Prescribed Fire Managers (PFMs). The primary research objective of the successful candidate is to characterize short, medium, and long-term climatological-risk for PFMs in the Southeast US, and to build a framework that allows for optimal decision making under uncertainty.

The successful candidate will work with Drs. Brian Reich (Statistics), Jaime Collazo (Applied Ecology), and Adam Terando (USGS) to model environmental conditions conducive to prescribed burning activities over time scales of days to decades in the future. Three major objectives of the position include 1). Define, identify, and model ‘fail-states’, or the sets of conditions that PFMs wish to avoid 2) Model risk exposure of PFMs given existing numerical model simulations of future climate over near-term (days) to long-term (decades) time scales, and 3) develop spatio-temporal models to characterize extreme wildfire risk on decadal time scales.

The incumbent will also join a national cohort as part of the National and Regional Climate Adaptation Postdoctoral Fellows (CAPF) Program. The SE CAPF scholar will collaborate with other cohort scholars from across the country on national-scale research and synthesis on climate-fire issues and participate in regular training and professional development opportunities, including training on translational ecology, co-production of actionable science with natural resource decision-makers, and interdisciplinary collaboration.

This is a two (2) year position, contingent on availability of funding, based in the Department of Applied Ecology and the Southeast Climate Adaptation Science Center at North Carolina State University in close collaboration with the Department of Statistics. The successful candidate will be jointly mentored by Drs. Brian Reich, Adam Terando, and Jaime Collazo.