Cross-scale thermal remote sensing of biospheric function

Organization
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

Reference Code
0325-NPP-NOV
26-GSFC-Earth Sci

Final date to receive applications
11/1/2026 6:00:59 PM Eastern Time Zone

The NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP) offers unique research opportunities to highly-talented scientists to engage in ongoing NASA research projects at a NASA Center, NASA Headquarters, or at a NASA-affiliated research institute. These one- to three-year fellowships are competitive and are designed to advance NASA’s missions in space science, Earth science, aeronautics, space operations, exploration systems, and astrobiology.

Advances in thermal remote sensing are providing new insights into plant water use as well as impacts of heat and drought. Tiered monitoring and measurement approaches using in-situ, drone, aircraft and space-based retrievals of surface emissivity, temperature, and evapotranspiration cover a range of processes linked to leaf, canopy and landscape scales. NASA’s current and upcoming thermal missions like ECOSTRESS, SBG, and Landsat-Next enable further development of such a tiered approach, while also necessitating in-situ validation.

To understand plant water use and temperature limits across scales and biomes, and to better integrate tiered measurement systems with new multi-spectral thermal imaging missions, we are looking for a post-doctoral candidate with expertise in plant ecophysiology and thermal remote sensing. The candidate will be expected to lead and design research that utilizes a range of spectroscopic techniques to address key and cutting edge questions in plant to ecosystem water use and impacts of climate variability and trends.

Earth Science

Shawn Serbin
shawn.p.serbin

Please email npp

Qualifications include curiosity and a passion for systems approach toward developing a scientific understanding of the Earth system. Subject matter expertise in ecophysiology, biogeochemistry, remote sensing and field ecology are desired. Programming experience in R, Python or other similar computing languages, as well as experience in code versioning software such as Git Hub. The position is expected to lead to peer-reviewed publications and presentations at major scientific conferences.

Mikeala

• Citizenship: U.S. Citizen Only
• Degree:
  Doctoral Degree.