Job Board

Job Description

NRC’s Herzberg Astronomy & Astrophysics Research Centre is excited to advertise the Herzberg Instrument Science Fellowship, a postdoctoral fellowship position open to early-career researchers with a planned start date of September 2027. We look forward to having a new postdoctoral fellow who shares our core values of Integrity, Excellence, Respect and Creativity join us at NRC Herzberg.

The Herzberg Instrumentation Fellowship is an independent (2+1 year) fellowship that is meant to empower a recent Ph.D. (those within 5 years of their doctorate) to explore their science and instrumentation interests within an inclusive environment for active research, learning and service. They will have a goal of becoming a Principal Investigator for the next generation of astronomical instruments and facilities. NRC Herzberg will provide them with the experience, support and professional development to help them grow into this role. The Herzberg Instrumentation Fellow will be expected to undertake research activities in astronomical instrumentation, and/or observational astronomy of relevance to their instrumentation interests. This position is tenable at either the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory (DRAO) in Penticton, BC, Canada, or the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory (DAO) in Victoria, BC, Canada, depending on the instrumentation interests of the successful candidate.

NRC Herzberg is a vibrant research centre with a federal mandate to support Canada’s international observatories and the Canadian astronomy community. NRC-Herzberg has a rare combination of staff involved in astronomy research, instrumentation design and development, engineering, data science and observatory support. This fellowship is intended to leverage this environment to help mentor researchers who will become the leaders enabling ambitious cutting edge astronomy research in the coming decades. We are committed to ensuring that all staff members promptly receive the accommodation they need to do their job and we understand the importance of work/life balance.

NRC Herzberg is a leading developer of instrumentation for Canada’s current and future ground- and space-based telescopes at radio through ultraviolet wavelengths, including major facilities such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the Canada France Hawaii Telescope (CFHT), Gemini and CASTOR. Active areas of research include Solar System objects, exoplanets and circumstellar disks, star formation, the interstellar medium, magnetic fields, the Milky Way and Local Group, near-field cosmology and resolved stellar populations, galaxy evolution, supermassive black holes and high redshift galaxies. Current and future ground- and space-based facilities from the UV to radio are represented in our instrumentation development, which includes radio astronomical instrumentation such as receivers, correlators, signal processing technology, and antenna design; and UV/optical/near-IR instrumentation such as adaptive optics, precision mechanics and detectors. Our instrument development activities also include the development of modest-scale pathfinder instruments and on-sky demonstrators.

Herzberg is eager to diversify the fields of research represented at our Research Centre. For this fellowship, we strongly encourage applications from researchers conducting research or developing new technologies fundamental or complementary to the next generation of observing facilities.