The National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC), in collaboration with the National Science Foundation's Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) program, invites applications for two-year postdoctoral fellowships that will begin August 1, 2016. SESYNC and LTER also invite applications for Collaborating Mentors, who will co-develop postdoctoral projects and provide substantive intellectual and methodological mentoring during the fellowship.
Synthesis is a research approach that brings together existing but disparate data, methods, theories, and tools in new and perhaps unexpected ways to reveal relationships or to generate novel insights. Synthesis is a highly varied effort, and its definition will change depending upon the lens of those who undertake it. However, in all cases, synthesis is a means for accelerating scientific understanding that is applicable across multiple places and scales. Synthesis of long-term data sets, ongoing experiments, and model results is an important goal of NSF's LTER program. These syntheses can provide new research findings, derived data sets, and new models that establish future research directions and inform the development of environmental policy. The current LTER projects collect long-term data in five core areas, and these are among the topics ripe for data discovery, analysis, visualization, and synthesis. A key element of successful postdoctoral fellowship applications will be the identification of specific research questions and synthesis-based methods for addressing them with these data. Applications should identify the sources and accessibility of existing data and the theoretical and analytical methods to be used. Prospective fellows should not propose projects that require collection of new data. These synthesis fellowships will engage and assist early-career investigators in the use and analysis of existing long-term data and in advanced computational methods to ask new questions and initiate new research collaborations. Fellows will identify long-term datasets that form the foundation for these syntheses. These must involve LTER data, but applicants are encouraged to include long-term data collected for projects outside of the LTER network as well. Proposed projects can focus on ecological or interdisciplinary questions. All types of projects may be proposed; interdisciplinary projects that synthesize natural and social science data would be most in line with SESYNC's mission. The postdoctoral fellows will be located at SESYNC in Annapolis, Maryland, where they will have access to a full range of sophisticated analytical, modeling, and visualization tools. Each synthesis fellow will work with a SESYNC facilitator and cyberinfrastructure specialists to identify the data and tools needed to address proposed synthesis questions. Applicants should have experience analyzing datasets and some familiarity with the use of contemporary statistical software. SESYNC offers substantial computational support and training opportunities for fellows. Therefore, successful applicants need not have experience in all of the technical aspects of their analyses. MORE INFORMATION Click here for information on SESYNC–LTER Postdoctoral Fellowships: http://www.sesync.org/opportunities/sesync-lter-postdocs Interested applicants must first submit a pre-screening application, accepted on a rolling basis but no later than October 26, 2015. Final fellowship applications must be submitted by December 7, 2015. Click here for information on SESYNC–LTER Collaborating Mentors: http://www.sesync.org/opportunities/sesync-lter-collaborating-mentors Applications for Collaborating Mentors are accepted on a rolling basis but no later than October 26, 2015 for inclusion in the Mentor Registry. QUESTIONS? Email: postdoc.applicat...@sesync.org The National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, funded through an award to the University of Maryland from the National Science Foundation, is a research center dedicated to accelerating scientific discovery at the interface of human and ecological systems. Visit us online at www.sesync.org and follow us on Twitter @SESYNC.
