Job description

The Postdoctoral Researcher – AI for Climate Science at ADIA Lab in Abu Dhabi is an on-site research role focused on advancing the application of artificial intelligence, data science, and high-performance computing to Earth system science and sustainability challenges. The role leads interdisciplinary research at the intersection of AI, climate modeling, and climate adaptation, contributing to global challenges through data-driven and computational approaches. The researcher conducts advanced work across Earth system data curation, AI-enhanced and hybrid AI-physics-based climate and weather models, climate adaptation and resilience applications, and ethical climate AI governance. Responsibilities include developing new datasets and data fusion approaches integrating satellite, in-situ, IoT, and citizen-science data; addressing spatiotemporal data gaps using AI-based interpolation, transfer learning, and synthetic data generation; building scalable, quality-controlled climate data platforms with metadata, machine learning annotations, and standardized classification schemes; and improving data pipelines for Earth System Digital Twin case studies. The role involves building and fine-tuning foundation models using satellite, reanalysis, and sensor data; integrating physics-aware machine learning into climate and weather models to improve sub-kilometer-scale process representation; advancing AI-driven data assimilation, emulation, and post-processing for weather-to-climate prediction; and developing large language model frameworks for synthesis and scientific reasoning in Earth system analysis. The position also focuses on AI for climate adaptation and resilience, including uncertainty quantification in downscaled projections of extreme weather and climate hazards, region-specific case studies linking climate impacts to water security, energy systems, infrastructure performance, and financial risk, and co-designing AI tools with domain experts and policymakers to support scenario planning, adaptive investment strategies, and early-warning systems. Additionally, the researcher contributes to ethical climate AI and governance by developing benchmarking infrastructures, shared experimental standards, reproducibility protocols, responsible-AI practices, and open science aligned with sustainability and transparency principles. The role includes mentoring graduate students and interns, co-authoring high-impact publications, contributing to competitive grant proposals, presenting research at major conferences, and collaborating across ADIA Lab’s interdisciplinary research pillars. The researcher works extensively with large geospatial datasets, multimodal Earth system data, reanalysis datasets, climate and weather model outputs such as ICON, WRF, and MPAS, advanced machine learning frameworks including Python, PyTorch, TensorFlow, and JAX, and high-performance computing resources including cloud platforms and GPU clusters.