The fellowship program has an outstanding reputation for attracting the best and the brightest PhDs in the sciences and for training future leaders in Climate and Global Change Science. In FY25, the C&GC Postdoctoral Fellowship Program highlights the need for applications across the full breadth of disciplines contributing to Climate and Global Change Science.
Innovative research within and across disciplines that span the spectrum of the physical, social, and integrated sciences is needed to understand, better predict, plan for, and manage the Earth System and its interactions in a changing climate, how communities experience and are impacted by these changes, and how society will pursue low-carbon adaptation pathways for a secure and sustainable future. NOAA’s Science Council emphasizes the importance of extramural investments in climate science spanning observations, analysis, modeling, and the integration of social, behavioral, and economic research across NOAA mission areas (NOAA Strategic Research Guidance Memorandum FY25). Each appointed fellow is hosted by a mentoring scientist at a U.S. university or research institution (including Federal laboratories and FFRDCs) to work in an innovative climate-related research area of mutual interest to advance NOAA’s science mission. This mission is to understand and predict climate, weather, oceans, and coast changes and illustrate relevance to the NOAA FY22-26 Strategic Plan. For example, our plan calls for Integrated Breakthrough Climate Research under the Build a Climate Ready Nation goal.
NOAA Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellows focus on advancing Climate and Global Change Science. This includes science that furthers our understanding of physical earth system processes, climate impacts, and climate adaptation science. Examples include: observing, understanding, modeling, and predicting climate variability, change, and impacts on seasonal and longer time scales; documentation and analysis of past, current, or possible future climate variability and change; the study of the underlying Earth Systems processes, including physical-, chemical-, biological-, biogeochemical-, coupled human-systems processes, and/or their interactions. Coupled human-systems processes include climate adaptation science and its methods and analyses considering vulnerabilities, decision-making contexts, and/or policy pathways for a low-carbon, sustainable, and equitable future society. Applications may be focused on one discipline or be interdisciplinary, integrating across disciplines.