Postdoctoral Associate

Required Qualifications: (as evidenced by an attached resume)

• Ph.D. (or foreign equivalent) in geosciences, geophysics, physics, chemistry, materials science, chemical engineering, or a closely related field, in hand by the date of appointment.
• Research experience performing first-principles electronic structure or density functional theory calculations using an established code (for example VASP, Quantum ESPRESSO).
• Research experience performing molecular dynamics simulations.
• Experience training, fine-tuning, or validating machine-learning interatomic potentials or force fields (for example MACE, NequIP, DeePMD).
• Experience running scientific calculations on Linux-based high-performance computing clusters, including scripting or workflow automation (for example Python, bash, or an equivalent language).
• At least one peer-reviewed publication in a scientific journal.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with free-energy or phase-boundary calculations, such as two-phase coexistence simulations, thermodynamic integration, or the Z-method.
• Research experience with geological materials at high pressure and high temperature.
• Experience extracting transport properties from molecular dynamics trajectories.
• Experience with GPU-accelerated machine learning frameworks (for example CUDA, PyTorch, or GPU-enabled LAMMPS).
• Experience with an established molecular dynamics engine such as LAMMPS, ASE.
• Experience generating and curating training datasets, including active learning or uncertainty-driven sampling strategies.
• Experience presenting research at national or international scientific conferences.
• Experience preparing computing allocation requests to national facilities such as NSF ACCESS, DOE INCITE, or NERSC.
• Experience with version control and reproducible research practices, including Git and documented computational workflows.

Brief Description Of Duties

The Postdoctoral Associate will collaborate with the Principal Investigator in the Department of Geosciences to carry out computational research on the melting behavior and physical properties of geological materials under conditions relevant to planetary interiors. This work will rely on large-scale atomistic simulations paired with machine-learning interatomic potentials.

Duties

• The postdoc will generate density functional theory reference data, use it to train and validate machine-learning force fields, run molecular dynamics simulations based on those potentials, analyze the data, interpret it geophysically.
• Write up the findings for peer-reviewed publication, and present them at conferences and group meetings.
• Participate in group activities, such as mentoring students.
• Other duties or projects as assigned as appropriate to rank and departmental mission.

Special Notes

This is a full-time appointment. FLSA Exempt position, not eligible for the overtime provisions of the FLSA. Minimum salary threshold must be met to maintain FLSA exemption.

Visit The Office of Postdoctoral Affairs to learn more about our postdoctoral community.

Resume/CV and cover letter should be included with the online application.

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Job Field

Post Doctoral

Primary Location

US-NY-Stony Brook

Schedule

Full-time

Posting Start Date

Sep 15, 2026

Posting End Date

Sep 28, 2026, 8:59:00 PM

Salary

$58,000-$68,000 (plus $4000 location pay) Annual @ 1.0 FTE

Appointment Type

Regular

Salary Grade

SL1