PREP0002432 Sustainability-Resilience Framework Fellow

PREP Research Associate

Opportunity No.: PREP0002432

This position is part of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Professional Research Experience (PREP) program. NIST recognizes that its research staff may wish to collaborate with researchers at academic institutions on specific projects of mutual interest, and thus requires that such institutions must be the recipient of a PREP award. The PREP program requires staff from a wide range of backgrounds to work on scientific research in many areas. Employees in this position will perform technical work that underpins the scientific research of the collaboration.

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Sustainability-Resilience Framework Fellow

The PREP researcher will focus time on efforts that support the project: “Cost-Effective Resource Allocation Strategies for Community Resilience.” (Applied Economics Office, Dr. Jennifer Helgeson and Dr. Christina Gore)

It is expected that the PREP Researcher will engage in all steps of the research process, including but not limited to literature review, data collection, data analysis, preparation of reports and archival journal articles, as well as reporting and communication with stakeholders.

The objective of this role is to support community resilience planning through the development of methods and tools that evaluate the economic impacts of disruptive events and persistent stressors while accounting for stakeholder perceptions and associated decisions related to future event uncertainty and co-benefit (co-cost) valuation. There will be a special focus on criteria and methods to improve the resilient performance of structural systems in the built environment while maintaining cost-effectiveness and supporting community-defined objectives in addition to resilience.

There is a shocking lack of coordination across Greenhouse Gas mitigation and climate resilience and adaptation. This researcher will address the identification of and suggestions for core needs for analyzing the synergies and tradeoffs in the evaluation of climate change mitigation and adaptation (and resilience) together.

This research will explore synergies, and possibly tradeoffs, between adaptation and mitigation. It is clear that ambitious GHG mitigation is also critical to adaptation success. As noted by the AR6 IPCC Synthesis Report, “The effectiveness of adaptation, including ecosystem-based and most water-related options, will decrease with increasing warming”. At the same time, some mitigation measures, deployed at certain scales, can have negative impacts on sustainable development and adaptation. For example, afforestation or production of biomass crops can have adverse socio-economic and environmental impacts, including on biodiversity, food and water security, local livelihoods, and the rights of Indigenous Peoples, especially if implemented at large scales. Many gaps in knowledge remain about these synergies and trade-offs and frameworks for assessment. This work will highlight system transitions that can help exploit synergies and avoid trade-off, and also try to identify critical areas for future research. This will include new modeling approaches, interdisciplinarity, bringing together qualitative and quantitative information, and developing more inclusive scenarios. The researcher may draw from peer-reviewed and gray literature as well as research focused on cases in both the Global North and Global South for application to the U.S. context.

Key responsibilities will include but are not limited to:

• Collaborate on data and methods to improve the methodology for measuring the economic impact of community resilience planning, which is organized around the performance metric of ‘cost plus loss’ minimization – i.e., the economically optimal level of investment in prevention and mitigation activities to reduce future disturbance and disaster-related losses, as well as related expenditures that minimize the combined investment cost plus the value of expected losses.
• Create a corpus of papers that discuss frameworks and relevant topics.
• Create a review document of frameworks for:
  • Climate change adaptation
  • GHG mitigation
  • Community resilience
  • Combinations thereof
• Compare and contrast the different frameworks within the review document of where they are compatible and where there need to be improvements to create one unified framework. 

Desired Qualifications:

• A graduate degree in Economics, Social Science, Policy, Environmental Science, Law, or a related field.
• At least 5 years of relevant research experience.
• Background in econometrics or statistics and at least two of the following areas:
  • Applied microeconomics
  • Climate change
  • Decision-science or behavioral-science
  • Environmental Economics
  • Environmental Law
  • Environmental Science
  • Non-market valuation
  • Policy
  • Regional economics
  • Risk and uncertainty 
  • Social Science
• Strong oral and written communication skills.
• This position is open to participants from Bowie State University, Coppin State University, Morgan State University, North Carolina A&T University, Tuskegee University, and the University of Maryland Eastern Shore

Other Details:

• Part-time: the participant is expected to work 8 hours per week.
• Location: Hybrid - the participant will work both at the NIST Gaithersburg Campus, Physically at the University, and remotely.
• Duration: this is a one-year position. Extensions are sometimes granted depending on the availability of funds.
• For questions related to the research project or the nature of the work in this position, please contact Dr. Jennifer Helgeson (jennifer.helgeson@nist.gov). For questions related to the online application or NIST PREP more generally, please contact Dr. John Brandau (john.brandau@morgan.edu).

Privacy Act Statement

Authority: 15 U.S.C. § 278g-1(e)(1) and (e)(3) and 15 U.S.C. § 272(b) and (c)

Purpose: The National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) hosts the Professional Research Experience Program (PREP) which is designed to provide valuable laboratory experience and financial assistance to undergraduates, post-bachelor’s degree holders, graduate students, master’s degree holders, postdocs, and faculty.

PREP is a 5-year cooperative agreement between NIST laboratories and participating PREP Universities to establish a collaborative research relationship between NIST and U.S. institutions of higher education in the following disciplines including (but may not be limited to) biochemistry, biological sciences, chemistry, computer science, engineering, electronics, materials science, mathematics, nanoscale science, neutron science, physical science, physics, and statistics. This collection of information is needed to facilitate administrative functions of the PREP Program.

Routine Uses: NIST will use the information collected to perform the requisite reviews of the applications to determine eligibility, and to meet programmatic requirements. Disclosure of this information is also subject to all the published routine uses as identified in the Privacy Act System of Records Notices: NIST-1: NIST Associates.

Disclosure: Furnishing this information is voluntary. When you submit the form, you are indicating your voluntary consent for NIST to use the information you submit for the purpose stated.