Postdoctoral Associate

Job Description

The Department of Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation at Virginia Tech is hiring a postdoctoral associate. This position will be funded by a newly acquired ESTCP project entitled, Evaluation and validation of vegetation, fuel, and fire behavior tools and technology in hardwood-dominated forest ecosystems of Virginia and the eastern United States. The project is being led by Dr. Adam Coates and includes Drs. Carrie Fearer, Verl Emrick, and Mark Ford as Co-PIs.

Goals for this project include:

1. Inventory of fuels, using traditional transect methods and terrestrial laser scanning (TLS), throughout hardwood-dominated locations in Virginia, including several Department of War installations and bases and large sections of the George Washington-Jefferson National Forest
2. Investigation of TLS metrics for the calculation and determination of unique wildlife habitat metrics
3. Utilization of fuels inputs from this region in fire behavior modeling
4. Creation of monitoring protocols that can be implemented to advance fuels monitoring and management across the Commonwealth.

Required Qualifications

• PhD in Forest Resources or a similar discipline. PhD must be awarded no more than four years prior to the effective date of appointment with a minimum of one year eligibility remaining.
• Experience in remote sensing
• Publication record in peer-reviewed journals
• Strong analytical stills, including the use of statistical software (R, JMP, SAS, etc.)

Preferred Qualifications

N/A

Overtime Status
Exempt: Not eligible for overtime

Appointment Type
Restricted

Salary Information
$60,000

Hours per week
40

Review Date
March 23, 2026