Research Fellow - Tropical Ecosystem Monitoring and Simulations

About the role

The Yanyan Cheng research group at NTU's Asian School of Environment (ASE) is seeking a Research Fellow for a Singapore NRF-funded project. The fellow helps advance research in Earth system modelling and understand interactions among land, water, carbon, energy, atmosphere, ecosystems and human systems. The appointment is one year long and potentially renewable depending on performance and funding availability.

Key responsibilities

• Collect, validate and harmonize field and remote sensing imagery for ecosystem monitoring.
• Develop machine/deep learning-based workflows to interpret ecosystem disturbance.
• Synthesize model simulations and multi-source observations to diagnose how the atmosphere responds to changes in land surface properties and the associated land-atmosphere feedbacks.
• Participate in mentoring RAs and students at ASE.

Required profile

• PhD in physical geography, remote sensing or ecology; preferably several years of experience in ecosystem monitoring, manipulation experiment design, diagnosis frameworks (knowledge-guided machine learning, causal inference, Bayesian neural networks), evaluation of simulation results and analysis of model improvement mechanisms.
• Familiarity with remote sensing data processing across satellite, airborne and ground platforms (optical, radar, lidar).
• Familiarity with tropical climate and environmental studies.
• Published scientific papers in high-quality research journals.
• Good written and spoken English, as stakeholder engagement is required.

Required skills

• Advanced Python, plus R, NCL and MATLAB.
• Scientific computing, high-performance computing and scripting (Bash, CDO/NCO).
• Strong quantitative and analytical skills with climate model and observational datasets.