Fellowship in Water Security

The Department of Defense (DoD) is offering a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), a world leader in timely, relevant, accurate and actionable GEOINT.

Water is a vital component to human health and is closely linked with global security. As the selected candidate, you will join a community of scientists and researchers engaged in cutting edge research to address water security topics in one of two NGA Research Technical Teams: the Foundation Team or the Predictive Analysis Team. 

NGA’s Research Directorate, Foundation Team, advances capabilities and disruptive technologies to observe, extract, represent and attribute natural and man-made features, terrain, and bathymetry to characterize the earth. Research to exploit geospatial data to build future GEOINT capabilities addressing systemic and emerging defense and intelligence missions is also performed.

NGA’s Research Directorate, Predictive Analysis Team, encompasses techniques from data mining, predictive modeling, and machine learning that analyze current and historical facts to make predictions about future or other unknown events. Sometimes the event is in the future, but predictive analytics can be applied to any time of unknown – past, present or future.

Your participation in and contributions to this research will support President Biden’s Executive Order on tackling the climate crisis, for which water security is a major component.

Springfield, Virginia, or St. Louis, Missouri

NGA is ready to make appointments immediately. Exact start dates will be determined at the time of selection and in coordination with the selected candidate. Applications are reviewed on an ongoing basis and fellowships will be filled as qualified candidates are identified.

Appointments are initially for one year with the option to extend the appointment for up to four additional years, contingent upon project needs and funding availability.

As the selected candidate, you will receive:

You must have or be eligible to obtain and maintain a security clearance for the duration of your appointment. It is expected that after completing the necessary application for clearance a fitness determination will allow participation to begin with unclassified material, while awaiting a clearance.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) delivers world-class geospatial intelligence that provides a decisive advantage to policymakers, warfighters, intelligence professionals, and first responders. Anyone who sails a U.S. ship, flies a U.S. aircraft, makes national policy decisions, fights wars, locates, target, responds to natural disasters, or even navigates with a cellphone relies on NGA. NGA enables all of these critical actions and shapes decisions that impact our world through the indispensable discipline of geospatial intelligence.  For more information about NGA, please visit https://www.nga.mil/.

This program, administered by Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU) through its contract with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to manage the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE), was established through an interagency agreement between DOE and DoD. Participants do not enter into an employee/employer relationship with ORISE, ORAU, DoD or any other office or agency. Instead, you will be affiliated with ORISE for the administration of the appointment through the ORISE appointment letter and Terms of Appointment. Proof of health insurance is required for participation in this program. Health insurance can be obtained through ORISE. For more information, visit the ORISE Research Participation Program at the U.S. Department of Defense.

Radar, Hyperspectral, Spectral, Satellite, Geology, Earth Science, Water Quality, Natural Resources, Dam, Levee, Civil Engineering, Infrastructure, Remote Sensing, GIS, Geospatial, Hydrology Modeling, Hydraulic Modeling, Water Resources, Digital Elevation Models (DEM), Terrain Data, Flood, Natural Disasters, Landslides, HPC, Soils, Terrain Mobility, Lidar Data

The qualified candidate will have a doctoral degree or be within nine months of completion of that degree. Degree must have been received within five years of the appointment start date. U.S. military veterans who have been honorably discharged (or who have been medically discharged because of a service-connected disability) and who received a doctoral degree within ten years of the desired start date are also eligible.

Highly competitive applicants will have education and/or experience in one or more of the following: