University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Prof. Joaquin Vieira 
jvieira@illinois.edu

Many department members are active in LSST, in particular in the Dark Energy Science Collaboration (DESC), the Transient and Variable Stars Science Collaboration (TVSSC), the Solar System Science Collaboration (SSSC) and other ongoing optical surveys, including the Dark Energy Survey (DES), the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS V), the Young Supernova Experiment (YSE) and postdoctoral fellows are encouraged to work with faculty on these projects at the Center for Astrophysical Surveys (CAPS). UIUC and NCSA is also involved in extending the ANTARES alert broker for multi-messenger astrophysics with the Scalable Cyberinfrastructure for Multimessenger Astrophysics (SCiMMA) group, and are part of several other projects across the electromagnetic and gravitational wave spectrum, including SPT-3G, CMB-S4 and the LIGO-Virgo-Kagra (LVK) collaboration. Several other cross-disciplinary groups exist, including the Center for AI Innovation and the Midwest Data Science Innovation Initiative which includes members of Astronomy, Statistics and Data Science and NCSA researchers, as well as the Illinois Center for Advanced Studies of the Universe (ICASU) between Astronomy and Physics. Postdoctoral Fellows are also welcome to get involved in Illinois’ strong education and outreach activities, including the Girls Astronomy Summer Camps, Astronomy on Tap, The Hacker Within and more.

Illinois has a streamlined onboarding process for postdoctoral fellows, including HR and International office Support as needed. New fellows are automatically added to department listservs, Slack, and we typically encourage new fellows to present their work to the department, and meet with the faculty, staff and students to forge connections. Fellows are paired with faculty mentors, and strongly encouraged to work with graduate students, and can lead proposals for grant funding as PI. Faculty mentors not only work with fellows on research, but also provide career support and help provide development activities for fellows. CAPS and ICASU also host both postdoctoral and graduate student fellows who will be part of the LSSTC Postdoctoral Fellow’s cohort. The department has rich social interaction outside of work, and we introduce new fellows to activities in the Champaign-Urbana area and the greater Midwest. CAPS has dedicated high-performance and on-prem cloud computing resources that postdoctoral fellows may use.

https://caps.ncsa.illinois.edu/
https://astro.illinois.edu/
https://astro.illinois.edu/research/research-overview
https://icasu.illinois.edu

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