The Integrated Assessment and Climate Change (IACC) Research Group within the Energy, Climate, and Environment (ECE) Program at IIASA seeks a strong candidate to help develop and extend the current global modeling framework used within the group. The successful candidate will work with a team of international scientists who also develop and use the framework to perform state-of-the-art scenario modeling and assessment.
background
The Energy, Climate, and Environment Program (ECE) at IIASA hosts one of the world’s leading global Integrated Assessment Modeling (IAM) teams, and seeks to deepen the understanding of rapid, just, and feasible systems transformations toward environmental, social, and economic sustainability. Interdisciplinary teams within ECE use these and complementary methods to study trade-offs and synergies between multiple policy priorities and objectives, typically across multiple sectors and scales (global, regional, national and subnational). ECE’s scientific outputs inform international and national policy efforts related to climate change (e.g., implementation of the Paris Climate Agreement) and sustainable development (e.g., pursuit of the Sustainable Development Goals).
Over the past few years, the open source integrated assessment modeling platform MESSAGEix[1] has been relaunched with the goal of implementing best practices both from the perspective of research (e.g., transparency, reproducibility) and collaborative software development (e.g., versioning, continuous integration). The MESSAGEix modeling platform is used at IIASA as well as by a range of collaborators with different backgrounds and skills which has led to a growing community that contributes to developing the tool[2]. In addition to the modeling platform, researchers and software developers at ECE are managing a number of open-source tools to facilitate modelling and analysis of climate change mitigation scenarios. These tools and packages are developed in an open, collaborative process implementing best practices of scientific software development. An example for a highly visible tool is the Python package pyam for scenario data analysis and visualization[3].
[1] https://docs.messageix.org
main tasks and responsibilities
The successful candidate will closely collaborate with researchers from the IIASA ECE Program in addressing the following tasks:
skills, qualifications and experience
appointment terms
The successful candidate should be available to take up the position as soon as possible in 2024. We offer an initial fixed-term, full-time employment contract for one year, with the possibility for extension thereafter.
Eligible applicants wishing to work part-time hours may be considered.
Duties will be carried out at the IIASA premises in Laxenburg, near Vienna in Austria (up to 100 days per year home office working within Austria possible).
The successful candidate will be appointed either in accordance with the IIASA profiles for research careers as a Researcher/Research Scholar in Integrated Assessment Modeling or in accordance with the IIASA research software professionals profiles as a Research Software Professional with an emphasis on global integrated assessment model software development.
IIASA salaries are:
Further details here.
IIASA is committed to a working environment that promotes equality, diversity, tolerance and inclusion within its workforce. This is reflected in our IIASA core values. We encourage qualified candidates from all religious, ethnic, and social backgrounds to apply. In the case that candidates are equally qualified, preference will be given to applicants from countries where IIASA has a Member Organization.
For further information about this opportunity please contact:
Matthew Gidden, IACC Senior Research Scholar
For general information about working at IIASA, please contact: recruitment@iiasa.ac.at
To apply for this opportunity, you will need to provide the following documents in English:
Deadline for receipt of applications: until filled