Join

For Autumn 2024, we have opportunities for graduate students to join by applying for fellowships, and applying for support as a TA in the School of Earth Sciences. We do not have any graduate research (GRA) position appointments available starting in Autumn 2024, but may have positions after. See below for details.

We would love to hire a new graduate student to work on estimating river discharge from the recently launched satellite mission, https://swot.jpl.nasa.gov. We have a recently published paper that describes SWOT river discharge estimation approaches: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2021WR031614. Durand serves as one of the co-leads of the SWOT Discharge Algorithm Working Group. We would love to supervise a student that takes these discharge measurements and uses them to analyze hydroclimatological response across river basins, or works to improve SWOT discharge measurement accuracy. 

We would also love to hire a student to work with SnowEx (https://snow.nasa.gov/campaigns/snowex) measurements to estimate snow water equivalent, a fast-changing part of the world's water cycle. Durand has served as one of the SnowEx organizers for the Alaska campaign.

There are three usual paths for graduate student funding: fellowship, grants (GRA), and TA. The School of Earth Sciences application deadline is December 1. Read more about Ohio State fellowships here: https://gradsch.osu.edu/fellowships. They are competitive and do have GPA requirements.

If you apply but do not receive a fellowship, expect to be funded as a graduate teaching assistant for the first year, and as a research assistant on following years. Our group regularly secures new grant funding, and PhD students from our group have excellent success rates at the NASA FINESST (https://science.nasa.gov/researchers/solicitations/roses-2022/amendment-70-f5-finesst-graduate-student-research-proposals-final-text-and-proposal-due-date). All students in this group have been entirely or almost entirely funded on grants. That said, TA-ing is invaluable experience, and a year with no direct research responsibilities can provide a good opportunity to set your research direction without having direct research responsibilities.

If you are interested in these opportunities, you are welcome to apply to the program in the School of Earth Sciences! However, application fees are expensive, so we do recommend reaching out to Prof Durand at durand.8@osu.edu prior to applying. Please attach a CV and state your research interest. Thanks for your interest in the program and best of luck in your career!