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A team of faculty, William Wilcock, Brad Lipovsky, Marine Denolle and Shima Abadi, in the School of Oceanography and Department of Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Washington (UW) are seeking a Postdoctoral Scholar for a collaborative project with Nokia Bell Labs to investigate the capabilities of a potentially transformative multi-span distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) technology. The approach relies on high-loss loopback couplers and polarization-resolved optical frequency domain reflectometry to sense beyond the optical repeaters on submarine telecommunication cables with target specifications of 60 Hz sampling rate and 100 m sampling length. 

The data for this project will come from a 3-month experiment, scheduled for November 2025 – January 2026, on the two cables of the Ocean Observatories Initiative Regional Cabled Array (https://oceanobservatories.org/regional-cabled-array/) that land in Pacific City, Oregon. 

One cable runs 500 km west to Axial Seamount, while the other extends 350 km onto the incoming plate before looping southward onto the continental slope and shelf off Newport, Oregon. The full dataset will comprise multi-span DAS across the full aperture of the two cables, conventional multiplexed DAS on the first span, and contemporaneous recordings from a rich suite of oceanographic, seismic, and acoustic sensors on the OOI RCA.

Potential areas of investigation include:

• Earthquake seismology: detection, characterization, and location of regional/local earthquakes and tectonic tremor, with implications for the Cascadia megathrust and Axial Seamount volcanism.
• Physical oceanography: analysis of surface gravity waves, infragravity waves, internal tides, and vortex-induced vibrations for estimating ocean current speeds.
• Acoustic ecology and ship noise: tracking baleen whales and shipping activity, assessing impacts on marine ecosystems, and exploring geoacoustic inversion techniques.
• Seafloor structure imaging: ambient noise tomography to generate high-resolution shear wave velocity maps across the accretionary wedge and oceanic plate.

The successful candidate will be based in the UW FiberLab (https://fiberlab.uw.edu) under the supervision of Brad Lipovsky and William Wilcock where they will have access to in-house petascale computing facilities and cloud computing allocations. They will interact widely with all the participants in the project and have the opportunity to engage with the interdisciplinary community of UW researchers with interests in fiber sensing and join the UW eScience Institute (https://escience.washington.edu) as a Data Science Postdoctoral Fellow.

This position is full-time (100% FTE), 12- months/year, with an initial term appointment of one year (12 months), renewable depending on funding and/or satisfactory performance for a total period of up to 3 years. The salary for this position will be $6,498 per month, commensurate with experience and qualifications, or as mandated by a U.S. Department of Labor prevailing wage determination. The position is available from January 1, 2026, with a preference to fill the position on that date. The review process will commence immediately with equal priority given to all applications received by November 1, 2025, and will continue until filled.

University of Washington postdoctoral scholar appointments are for a temporary, defined period not to exceed five years/60 months, including any previous postdoctoral experience. At the time of their appointment, candidates must have a Ph.D. in an applicable field such as geophysics, oceanography, computer science or engineering. The successful candidate will have a strong background in Earth science, signal processing, and computational data analysis; demonstrated written and verbal communication skills; and the ability to work both independently and collaboratively with individuals from a wide spectrum of backgrounds. They will work in an “Open Science” environment emphasizing workflow reproducibility in version-controlled settings. Candidates must be comfortable practicing and/or learning high-performance computing for large-scale observational seismology on local and cloud UNIX environments.  Desirable additional areas of expertise include experience with fiber sensing, machine learning tools, and big data workflows.

To apply, candidates will submit materials via Interfolio, comprising (1) a letter of interest describing their skills, experience and research interests,( 2) a curriculum-vitae including a list of publications and links to any open code repositories, (3) two representative publications, and (4) the names and contact information for three references. PDF files are preferred.