We welcome new students, visiting scientists, research fellows, and postdocs with an interest in one or more of the following:

  • Reconstructions of past climate variability, change, and extreme events
  • Paleoclimate data assimilation and the application of other advanced statistical techniques to problems in paleoclimatology
  • Collecting and developing new tree-ring chronologies for reconstructions of temperature, precipitation, drought, snow, and ocean-atmosphere dynamics
  • Quantitative wood anatomy (QWA) for climate and extreme event reconstructions
  • Tropical dendrochronology and recent tropical climate variability, particularly in Central America
  • Stable or radiogenic isotope dendrochronology, particularly focused on reconstructing ocean-atmospheric circulation, tropical climate variability, or providing precise chronology for important events in Earth's history
  • Paleoclimate dynamics using the combined power of paleoclimate proxies and models, including the connection between climate and ecological processes (productivity, fire, forest dynamics), understanding large-scale modes of climate variability, and using networks of proxies to understand past ocean-atmosphere variability.
  • Research integrating climate data and paleoclimate reconstructions with historical and archaeological data to better understand the interactions and feedbacks between coupled human and natural systems in the past.
  • Central American climate — past, present, and/or future — using methods from the physical and/or social sciences


Potential graduate students and postdoctoral scientists are highly encouraged to contact current and previous members of the lab to gain an independent perspective on academic life at the University of Arizona, living in Tucson and the southwest, and the style and history of mentorship and training in our lab.

The US National Science Foundation (NSF) maintains a website that is a clearinghouse for various funding opportunities for graduate students and postdoctoral scientists here: https://new.nsf.gov/science-matters/nsf-101-graduate-postdoctoral-researcher-funding

Postdoctoral Scholar and Fellow Opportunities


June 2025: Please note that many of these opportunities below have changed or been terminated due to the ongoing dismantling of federal science in the United States by the Trump regime. I have updated some of this information to reflect that.

If you are interested in preparing NOAA, NSF, NASA, or other postdoctoral fellowship applications to come to the University of Arizona, please contact me to discuss options and your plan for a research proposal. Our lab welcomes postdoctoral scientists broadly interested in working on research questions related to any aspect of past, present, and future climate and environments as well as coupled natural-human systems and the dynamics of socio-environmental systems.

The NOAA Climate & Global Change Postdoctoral Program provides an excellent opportunity for postdoctoral research. The deadline is typically very early in January every year. Unlike the NSF opportunities below, the NOAA program is open to non-US citizens and non-permanent residents on a visa. Please be aware that due to government funding issues, NOAA did not make any new Fellowship awards in 2025 and there is a risk the program will again not have the resources in 2026.

The NSF postdoctoral fellowship program in Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE), which previous accepted proposal for projects related to human-environment geography and spatial sciences, is currently not accepting new proposals.

If you have a Ph.D. in the Earth, Ocean, Atmospheric, or Environmental Sciences (and you are a US citizen or permanent resident),you may want to consider the Postdoctoral Fellowship Program from NSF AGS (which has a rolling deadline) or the Postdoctoral Fellowship Program from NSF EAR (which in 2025 has a October deadline).

Postdoctoral Fellowships are no longer available from the NSF's Office of Polar Programs.

Graduate Student Opportunities



Students in my lab work in a range of research areas including multiproxy dendrochronology, spatiotemporal data analysis and data assimilation for paleoclimate reconstruction, coupled human-natural systems and the connection between climate change and (past) human society, and paleoclimatology across a range of timescales and different proxy systems around the world. What is most important is not the tools we use, but rather the questions we ask and the impacts they have for society.

If you are contacting me regarding graduate school, please be quite specific about how your research interests overlap with mine and those of my lab. I am unable to respond to emails that do not make this connection clearly.

Graduate school application deadlines are in earliest January of each year for autumn admissions. I mentor and advise students in Geography, as well as the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research. More information on the graduate program (including admissions requirements and deadlines) in Geography is available here (Masters) and here (PhD). I am no longer accepting new students through Geosciences, although I will continue to serve on Geosciences graduate committees.

Graduate students may also wish to consider simultaneously applying to the American Meteorological Society Graduate Fellowship program (only available to 1st year graduate students) and the US National Science Foundation's Graduate Research Fellowship Program (as of 2025, available to students in their last year of an undergraduate degree or 1st year graduate students only). Other relevant graduate fellowships include the DOE's Computational Science Graduate Fellowshi and the US Department of Defense National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship,

Visitors


The Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research has the Agnese N. Haury Visiting Scholar & Trainee Fellowship, which provides limited funding to support visitors to the LTRR for several weeks to learn new skills in dendrochronology and collaborate with LTRR investigators. In those years when the program is offered and there is sufficient funding, the deadline for applications is typically in the late spring.