Postdoctoral Research Opportunity – Grassland, Soil, and Water Research Laboratory

Zintellect offers a Postdoctoral Research Opportunity at the USDA ARS Grassland, Soil, and Water Research Laboratory in Temple, TX. The role involves joining the modeling team for the Conservation Effects Assessment Project (CEAP) to assess environmental impacts of conservation practices. Responsibilities include refining plant growth databases and utilizing various models. The position is full-time for one year, requires health insurance, and is open to U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents.
A Postdoctoral Research Opportunity is available with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Agricultural Research Service (ARS) Grassland, Soil and Water Research Laboratory (GSWRL) in Temple, Texas. The selected applicant will join the modeling team working on the Conservation Effects Assessment Project (CEAP), a multi-agency, multi-University effort to quantify the environmental effects of conservation practices and programs and develop the science base for managing the agricultural landscape for environmental quality. CEAP's findings are used to guide USDA conservation policy and program development and help conservationists, farmers and ranchers make more informed conservation decisions.

CEAP assessments are carried out at local, regional, and national scales. They require inputs from large databases (weather, soils, etc.) and use of process based models. The USDA-ARS and Texas A&M AgriLife, located at Temple, Texas, support a family of such models, which provide output information at a daily time step. The outputs of the models include yields, nutrient losses, soil losses, hydrological dynamics, etc. The models are able to simulate current and changing land use, climate change, and economic or social constraints on land use.

The applicant will have the opportunity to interface with the CEAP team, as well as the opportunity to work with the SWAT, APEX, EPIC, and ALMANAC model developers. The applicant's primary work within the modeling team will be to refine the database associated with plant growth. This will require constructing model runs to calibrate and validate current and developing plant parameters across the United States. Because the CEAP project functions on agricultural practices across all private lands of the United States, plants included in simulations vary from grape vines and orchard trees, to native grasses and shrubs, to conventional and high value crops, to wetland plants.

There will be opportunity to explore model application in an agricultural context and publications are encouraged.

The position is full-time for one year and may be renewed upon recommendation of the ARS and availability of funding. The participant must show proof of health insurance. The participant does not become an employee of ARS or ORISE.

While participants will not enter into an employment relationship with ARS, this position requires a pre-employment check and a full background investigation.

This opportunity is available to U.S. citizens, Lawful Permanent Residents (LPR), and foreign nationals. Non-U.S. citizen applicants should refer to the Guidelines for Non-U.S. Citizens Details page of the program website for information about the valid immigration statuses that are acceptable for program participation.

This is an equal opportunity program open to all qualified individuals without regard to race, color, age, sex, religion, national origin, mental or physical disability, genetic information, sexual orientation, or covered veteran’s status.

For more information about the ARS Research Participation Program, please visit the Program Website.