Post-Doc Research Associate - AI Credible Climate Mitigation

Position Title

Post-Doc Research Associate - AI for Credible Climate Mitigation

UNC Institute for the Environment, Chapel Hill, NC

Position Type:
Postdoctoral Scholar (Full-Time Temporary)

Hours per week: 40

Estimated Duration: 12 months

Salary Range: $68,000 – $72,000

Start Date:

02/09/2026

The Data-Driven Enviro Lab (DDL) at UNC-Chapel Hill seeks a Postdoctoral Research Associate for CLAIM, the Center for Climate Leadership and AI-driven Integrity in Mitigation. The role focuses on leveraging generative AI and large language models (LLMs) to advance climate mitigation while ensuring integrity of climate commitments. The researcher will be part of an interdisciplinary team spanning computer science, climate policy, law, and social science.

• Develop, adapt, and evaluate LLM/genAI systems for climate mitigation intelligence, including tracking city, region, and non‑state actor commitments.
• Design and validate benchmarks, metrics, and auditing pipelines to test the accuracy, credibility, fairness, and robustness of LLM outputs related to climate targets and policy claims.
• Rigorous testing of genAI/ML models against misinformation, disinformation, and green washing, including stress‑testing under adversarial, low‑resource, and multilingual settings.
• Study how generative AI shapes real‑world climate behavior and impacts corporate and subnational mitigation planning, transparency, and accountability.
• Contribute to CLAIM’s broader mission through data collection, methodological innovation, open tools, papers, and policy‑facing outputs that improve climate commitment integrity.

• PhD in Computer Science, Computing, Statistics, Data Science, or a related discipline.

• PhD in a relevant field.
• Hands‑on experience training, fine‑tuning, or adapting LLMs or generative AI models (e.g., instruction tuning, domain adaptation, RAG pipelines), demonstrated in publications, open‑source code, or deployed tools.
• Strong experience in LLM/genAI evaluation and benchmarking: factuality/hallucination testing, robustness, calibration, bias/fairness, and/or adversarial stress‑testing.
• Solid programming and ML/NLP engineering skills in Python and modern deep‑learning stacks (PyTorch, JAX, Hugging Face/Transformers, vector databases, RAG tooling), and ability to build reproducible research pipelines.
• Working knowledge of climate change mitigation and environmental governance, familiarity with climate commitments, emissions accounting, or policy/action tracking, and motivation to apply AI in this space.
• Critical thinking, proactive attitude, and ability to work independently and within an interdisciplinary team.

• Excellent organization and time‑management skills.

University benefits include medical and vision coverage, paid leave, and professional development services. For more information on UNC Postdoctoral Benefits and Services, please refer to the university website.

Posting Open Date: 12/04/2025

Final date to receive applications: 01/04/2026

Vacancy