The University of Georgia has received a $1.5 million award from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to support the creation of eight postdoctoral positions, supporting scientific advancement and strengthening UGA’s research capacity in the natural sciences.
Two faculty members at the UGA Skidaway Institute of Oceanography, Natalie Cohen and Sara Rivero-Calle, both in UGA Franklin College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Marine Sciences, will supervise postdoctoral researchers funded through the award.
Funding was offered to 30 research universities nationwide, with award amounts tied to each institution’s prior engagement with the foundation. UGA’s $1.5 million award reflects a longstanding relationship with the Moore Foundation dating back to 2004.
“As research personnel, postdocs play a very important role at UGA,” said Jessica Muilenburg, associate vice president for research. “This funding enables us to bring in the best and brightest for training, which is essential to the academic pipeline and the mission of UGA research. Postdocs are on the cutting edge of much of our innovation, and that innovation is enabled by avenues like grant and fellowship opportunities.”
Faculty applicants to supervise the new positions applied through an internal Limited Submission process and were selected by a committee. The Moore Foundation funding provides postdocs with the flexibility to pursue projects of their choosing, encouraging creativity and innovation. Each position will last two years, allowing recipients to engage in substantial research, training, and scientific progress during their time at the university.
Muilenburg collaborated with Matt Pruitt, senior director of foundation relations, to submit a plan to the Moore Foundation outlining how the funding would be allocated to best support postdoctoral education and research.
“There are two great things about this funding,” said Pruitt. “One is the tangible impact of funding postdoctoral fellows; it meets a really pressing need at the institution. The second is the reputational signal that it provides—that we have a longstanding relationship with Moore, a prominent national funder in the sciences based on the West Coast. We’re on their radar, and that signifies the high-level, high-impact kind of research we’re doing at UGA.”
Postdocs funded through the award will be supervised and trained by the following faculty:
- James Byers, Odum School of Ecology
- Sara Rivero-Calle, Skidaway Institute of Oceanography
- Sonia Herandez, Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources
- Natalie Cohen, Skidaway Institute of Oceanography
- Anny Chung, Franklin College Department of Plant Biology
- Kenan Song, School of Environmental, Civil, Agricultural, and Mechanical Engineering
- Yiping Zhao, Franklin College Department of Physics and Astronomy
- Ramviyas Nattanmai Parasuraman, School of Computing
“I am grateful to the Moore Foundation for continuing to fund my work on ocean remote sensing,” said Rivero-Calle. “This award will be used to recruit a postdoctoral researcher who will lead a project related to remote sensing of emerging harmful algal blooms (HABs) in the southeastern United States. This includes working with a prototype instrument to characterize the optical properties of HABs using phytoplankton cultures in the lab, working with local shellfish farmers in Georgia, and computational analysis to develop remote sensing algorithms to detect them from space.”
“This Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation award will be used to recruit a new postdoctoral researcher to explore metal metabolism in phytoplankton,” Cohen explained. “Using an existing environmental dataset from the central Atlantic Ocean, the project will examine how changes in trace metal availability influences community diversity and metabolism. An integrative analysis will link environmental conditions with transcript and protein expression to better understand how these organisms respond to shifting metal supplies.”
The job listing for the postdoctoral position in the Rivero-Calle Lab is live and available here. The job listing for the postdoctoral position in the Cohen Lab is live and available here. Job listings can also be found by searching the posting number on the UGA Jobs website. The posting number for the Rivero-Calle Lab position is G/R32411P, and the posting number for the Cohen Lab position is G/R32085P.
This article was originally published by UGA Today . It has been edited for republication on the UGA SkIO website.
About SkIO
The UGA Skidaway Institute of Oceanography (SkIO) is a multidisciplinary research and education institution located on Skidaway Island near Savannah, Georgia. The Institute was founded in 1967 with a mission to conduct research in all fields of oceanography. In 2013, SkIO was merged with the University of Georgia. The campus serves as a gateway to coastal and marine environments for programs throughout the University System. The Institute’s primary goals are to further the understanding of marine and environmental processes, conduct leading-edge research on coastal and marine systems, and train tomorrow’s scientists.