Postdoctoral Researcher

Details

Posted: 11-May-24

Location: Lawrence, Kansas

Type: Full-time

Salary: Open

Categories:

Staff/Administrative

Internal Number: 4938177

A postdoctoral research position is available at the University of Kansas in the laboratory of Dr. Sharon Billings. The successful candidate will contribute to a NSF-funded Frontier Research in Earth Science (FRES) award and work with team members at Oregon State University, Colorado School of Mines and Technology, University of California-Riverside, Texas Tech University, Penn State University, Kansas State University, and Boise State University. The goals of the larger project are to quantify when and the degree to which bedrock and roots control subsurface and atmosphere coupling, and the impact of these interactions on water and carbon fluxes. The successful candidate will focus on synthesis of existing data and address one or more questions such as the following, depending on the researcher's interests:

Exploration of preferential flow controls and relations to soil morphology, aggregate size distribution, and soil moisture with horizon across 7 different systems ranging from grasslands and shortgrass steppe to warm temperate forests and montane forests.

A multidisciplinary approach focused on changes in soil structure that explores soil development, organic matter changes, and interactions of roots and exudates on soils.

A meta analysis of root distributions and root water uptake strategies to develop a more accurate representation of plant functional rooting types for hydrologic and Earth System Models.

Analysis of a continental-scale dataset of soil, vegetation, and climate variables to investigate how land use history can drive soil processes important for biosphere-atmosphere feedbacks, and how those patterns vary with stage of soil development.

Development of spatially explicit products revealing how hillslope position, aspect, and slope influence soil properties in a diversity of climates, biomes, and land use histories.

Work on these questions requires some combination of analyses of root distributions, periodic and high frequency soil moisture data, and physical and chemical soil data. Specifically, the individual will:

• Work with physical or machine learning models to explore drivers of soil structure, preferential flow, depth distributions of soil carbon and nutrient pools, or root water uptake processes
• Synthesize leveraged datasets into databases for public use, maintain and facilitate sharing of research data with team members and in publicly available respositories; tabulate and display data for presentation in research conferences and for manuscript preparation.
• Publish results of their work in peer-reviewed literature.
• Be an advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion on campus, with collaborating institutions, and at all field sites.
• Leading or participating in outreach efforts.
• Assist in the mentoring of undergraduate and graduate students in the laboratory