Aurora

Employment & Opportunities

Full time Lecturer in Earth Sciences - Simon Fraser University

The Department of Earth Sciences (EASC), Faculty of Science, at Simon Fraser University, in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, invites applications for a full-time Teaching Faculty position at the rank of Lecturer, starting as early as September 1, 2022.

The undergraduate program in Earth Sciences consists of two streams in Environmental Geoscience and Geology and is structured to enable students to seek Professional registration with the Engineers and Geoscientists BC.

The successful candidate will report to the Chair of Earth Sciences and their primary responsibilities will include (but are not limited to) lecture, lab and field teaching (either as principal instructor or as part of a team) for some combination of lower and upper division courses in the Geology stream, e.g., EASC 101 (Introductory Geology), EASC 104 (Geohazards), EASC 206 and 306 (Field Geology I & II), EASC 205 (Introduction to Petrology), EASC 208 (Introduction to Geochemistry), EASC 301 & 311 (Igneous & Metamorphic Petrology).

The workload for this position will be equivalent to 5 undergraduate courses per annum. As a faculty member, the successful candidate will also perform service to the Department and the University, such as attending faculty meetings, and participating in departmental committees and initiatives.

The responsibilities, terms and conditions of employment of Teaching faculty are listed in the SFU-SFUFA collective agreement.
Please see here for more details on this position.

Engineer Positions - the Bureau of Reclamation

The Bureau of Reclamation, a water and power management agency in the western U.S, is hiring multiple engineer positions.

This posting is to fill multiple positions on the Colorado River Basin Research and Modeling Team stationed in Boulder, CO. Our team works on modeling and analysis to support near- and mid-term decisions as well as long-term planning for major Colorado River policies. We work with researchers to study climate change, forecasting, and decision science that can improve our tools and processes, ultimately supporting sound decisions and stakeholder needs. Recent and ongoing representative examples of our work include supporting the decision to undertake emergency operations at Glen Canyon Dam and developing a DMDU-based technical framework for upcoming negotiations to identify new operations at Lakes Powell and Mead.

Please click here for details, please note that the posting closes on June 15th.

Two Postdocs Positions - The University of New South Wales

UNSW Sydney has two postdoc opportunities available in the Climate Change Research Centre. Applications close 29 June.

1. One position focuses on improving the simulation of climate hazards by regional climate models, how we make regional climate projections, and how we make the results more useful to stakeholders.
2. The other position focuses on improving our understanding of how year-to year variability in the tropical Pacific and Indian oceans influences Australia’s weather and how projections under greenhouse warming in those ocean basins will affect our future climate

News & Events

PhD Thesis Defense: Andrew Steiner  

Title: Episodic Fluid Flow and Mass Transfer Along Pre-Existing Carbonate Veins: Implications for Gold Endowment in Carlin-Type Gold Deposits

Date & Time: Wednesday, June 8, 2022 at 9:00 am

Location: ESB 5104

MSc Thesis Defense: Nicole McEwan   

Title: Seasonality in the community composition and food web structure of plankton in the Strait of Georgia

Date & Time: Friday, June 10, 2022 at 9:00 am

Location: Zoom

The Ocean’s Whistleblower: The Remarkable Life and Work of Daniel Pauly - June 9, 2022

This is to invite you to the event The Ocean’s Whistleblower: The Remarkable Life and Work of Daniel Pauly, which will take place on June 9, 2022, at 6 pm PST, both online and at UBC’s AERL Theatre.

This event, organized by the Sea Around Us initiative with the support of UBC’s Faculty of Science, the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries and the French Consulate in Vancouver, looks for attendees to get to know Dr. Daniel Pauly’s contributions to science first-hand, all examined by Daniel himself through an interview with renowned journalist Peter Klein (CBS, Global Reporting Centre)

Dr. Pauly is the mind behind the idea of the shifting baselines syndrome, which explains how knowledge of environmental disaster fades over time, leading to a misguided understanding of change on our planet, and the fishing down marine food webs concept, which describes how in certain parts of the ocean, fisheries have depleted large predatory fish and are increasingly catching smaller – and previously spurned – species lower in the food web.

These overarching notions have brought him worldwide recognition, as has the co-creation of FishBase, the online, free encyclopedia of all fish, and the Sea Around Us, a research initiative that has reported massive declines in global fisheries catches in recent years.

Using his recently published biography – The Ocean’s Whistleblower – as a backdrop, attendees will also learn about Dr. Pauly’s life, which was shaped by struggle. Born in Paris, growing up as a mixed-race child in Switzerland, escaping to Germany from the family that had abducted him from his French mother, putting himself through school, experiencing a political and racial reawakening in the US in the late 1960s, finding his own identity through science and flourishing as a researcher first in the tropics and later on in Canada, where he feels more at home.

The Sea Around Us team would be pleased if you could join us on this trip down memory lane, which should also be a journey of envisioning the future of the science laid out by Dr. Pauly.

Please, let us know that you will be coming by RSVPing on the links below:

• In person here
• Online here

Obituary for Nikolas Christensen EOAS Honorary Professor

It is with great sadness that I report the passing of a friend and colleague Nikolas I. Christensen, Honorary Professor in EOAS. Nik died in his home in Anacortes, Washington State of natural causes on May 19, 2022. He was 85 years old.

Nik will be remembered as a gifted Earth scientist who made fundamental contributions to geology and geophysics, particularly the physical properties of the oceanic and continental crust and mantle lithosphere.  He stood out for his exceptional skills in the laboratory and was the world's foremost authority on elastic properties of crustal and upper mantle lithologies. His measurements of seismic velocities on the full range of commonly occurring rock types have provided the basis for countless interpretations of active and passive seismic studies aimed at understanding lithospheric structure and evolution.

A Wisconsin native, Nik began his career at the University of Wisconsin-Madison earning the B.S., M.S. and PhD (major in metamorphic petrology, minor in physics) degrees in 1959, 1961 and 1963. He moved to Harvard University in 1963-1964 as Research Fellow in Geophysics working under Francis Birch, one of the founders of solid Earth geophysics. It was under Birch's supervision that Nik developed his life-long interest in the elastic properties of rocks and their utility in deciphering the secrets of the then nascent theory of plate tectonics. Nik's career included faculty appointments at 5 universities: the University of Southern California (1964-1966, assistant professor), the University of Washington (1966-1983, assistant, associate and full professor), Purdue University (1983-1997, professor), his alma mater, the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1997-present, professor and emeritus professor), and the University of British Columbia (2005-present, honorary professor).

Nik performed extensive community service through his role on committees and panels of the American Geophysical Union, the Geological Society of America, the Ocean Drilling and Deep Sea Drilling Programs, the International Association of Seismology and Physics of the Earth's Interior, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and the National Research Council. Nik's exceptional contributions to Earth science have been recognized through Fellowships in the Geological Society of America (1969) and American Geophysical Union (1995), and through the George P. Woollard Award of the Geological Society of America (1996).

For those who worked with him, Nik was an inexhaustible source of insight regarding the Earth’s crust. He was a gifted teacher who could summarize complex concepts with rare clarity. He guided dozens of MS and PhD students, tailoring cutting-edge research topics to fit the individual’s  interests and skills. A majority of his students’ MS and PhD theses appeared as papers in the leading scientific journals, invariably with the student as first author.

Nik is predeceased by his wife Karen, of Long Beach, California, and is survived by his son Kirk, daughter Signe, and two grandchildren.