Skip to main content

LSSTC Catalyst Fellowship – Applications Closed

Deadline: 11:59pm, November 15, 2021

Image credit: Rubin Obs/NSF/AURA

The LSSTC Catalyst Fellowship Funded by the John Templeton Foundation is a unique postdoctoral fellowship providing support for independent research in big data from the forthcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory. The fellowship is a part of the LSST Interdisciplinary Network for Collaboration and Computing (LINCC) initiative, in which Northwestern is a founding member. LINCC is an ambitious program to build community-wide software infrastructure for big data astronomy. Catalyst Fellows at Northwestern receive a total of four years of funding.

Contact Prof. Adam Miller, amiller@northwestern.edu, with questions about being hosted by Northwestern/CIERA for a Catalyst Fellowship.

Deadline is November 15, 2021

Learn more about the Catalyst Fellowship and apply

Catalyst Fellows at CIERA

The Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA) at Northwestern University actively conducts research in multiple areas related to the Rubin Observatory/Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), including: the search for electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational wave sources, understanding the host galaxies of fast radio bursts (FRBs), probing the origins of stellar explosions, the development of machine learning models to classify petabyte-scale data sets, and the study of variable stars as probes of Galactic structure and stellar evolution. See ciera.northwestern.edu/programs/lsst/ for more details of the wide variety of LSST-related research, education, and outreach activities at CIERA.

As a LINCC member institution, Northwestern offers Catalyst Fellows four years of postdoctoral funding (one more than Catalyst Fellows at non-LINCC institutions).

Catalyst Fellows at CIERA benefit from a diverse and dynamic intellectual environment (learn more about CIERA’s programs and activities). CIERA has a strong record in postdoc mentorship, and hosts an active community of postdoctoral researchers. K-12 education and public outreach are also key components of CIERA’s mission.

Northwestern has institutional access to several small, mid-and large-scale optical/IR ground-based telescope facilities, including Keck, MMT, Las Cumbres Observatory (LCO), and the forthcoming SEDMv2, an ultra-low resolution IFU spectrograph for transient classification, and La Silla Southern Sky Survey (LS4), a new wide-field time-domain survey. Catalyst Fellows can apply for telescope time through CIERA’s internal time allocation process (see sites.northwestern.edu/cieraobserving for more information).

CIERA researchers have exclusive access to two high-performance computer clusters, providing access to 2,644 compute cores, including high-memory and GPU nodes. Additional HPC resources are available through Northwestern’s Quest cluster . A dedicated Computational Specialist is also on staff to assist CIERA researchers. See ciera.northwestern.edu/high-performance-computing for more information.

In addition, CIERA postdocs have access to quality training, professional development, and other resources offered through Northwestern’s Office of Postdoctoral Affairs.