Herzberg Instrument Science Fellow

Help bring research to life and drive your career forward with the National Research Council of Canada (NRC), Canada's largest research and technology organization.

We are looking for a Herzberg Instrument Science Fellow (Research Associate) to support our Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Centre. The Fellow would be someone who shares our core values of Integrity, Excellence, Respect and Creativity, and who is motivated to become the Principal Investigator for next generation astronomical instruments and facilities.

The Fellow will be an active research astronomer/instrumentalist who is able to become a key interface between astronomers and instrumentation teams working on new astronomical instruments and facilities. They will work at NRC’s Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Centre (NRC-HAA) within the Astronomy Technology Directorate (ATD; Science and Projects Team), that brings together leading astronomy researchers with engineers and technicians working on instrumentation design, development and integration.

NRC-HAA 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 develop researchers who will become the leaders necessary to enable ambitious new instrumentation for cutting edge astronomy research in the coming decades.

The ATD is a leading developer of instrumentation for Canada’s current and future ground
- and space-based telescopes at radio through to optical wavelengths (e.g., the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), the Attacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and Gemini. Its multi-disciplinary team includes project managers, optical, electrical, mechanical and systems engineers and technicians, signal processing experts and astronomers. Current major activities include correlator upgrades and central signal processing architectures for the SKA, ALMA and the Next Generation Very Large Array (ngVLA), composite dish antenna designs for new observatories including ngVLA, development for the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) expansion and the Canadian Hydrogen Observatory and Radio-transient Detector (CHORD), participation in the development of optical/near infrared spectrographs for Gemini, and adaptive optics systems for TMT.

In addition to leadership and participation in facility class instrumentation, the ATD maintains a strategic research and development program specialising in radio receivers, radio dishes, signal processing, adaptive optics, and optical/near infrared instrumentation,. This includes the development of modest-scale pathfinder instruments and on-sky demonstrators. This is in addition to astronomical research activities undertaken by astronomers in the ATD and elsewhere in HAA, that spans exoplanets, star and planet formation, near field cosmology and resolved stellar populations, galaxy evolution, supermassive black holes, high redshift galaxies, time domain astronomy, survey astronomy, and other fields. Activities are split between the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory in Penticton, which houses most of the radio expertise, and the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory in Victoria, which houses the millimeter-wave receiver group as well as most of the optical and near-infrared expertise.

**Your Challenge (cont.)**:

- Engage with the instrumentation teams in the ATD and provide scientific support, advocacy and insight through close interactions with the technical teams and the science user community, under the mentorship of existing ATD instrument scientists. Scientific support could include the development of science cases, science requirements, survey planning, development of observing simulators, supporting the design, build and integration of instruments, on-sky testing and commissioning, science exploitation, etc.
- Participate in professional development activities focused on supporting their development into the next generation of Principal Investigators for astronomical instruments, including leadership, project management, systems engineering, communication, and grant writing.
- Conduct original research in astronomical instrumentation and/or observational astronomy, independently and in collaboration with NRC-HAA staff members.
- Contribute to the scientific exploitation of other NRC-HAA resources, particularly, but not limited to, the expertise of scientific and technical staff, and the astronomical facilities and infrastructure administered by NRC-HAA, including the observatories as well as the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre (CADC) and the instrumentation labs.
- Engage with the astronomical community to advance Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics mandate to provide astronomical facilities and services to Canadian researchers.

The Herzberg Instrument Science Fellowship