ERW Geochemical Modeling Consultant

About Cascade

Join Cascade Climate, a global nonprofit accelerating progress in climate interventions that leverage Earth’s natural systems to stabilize our climate. We work across industry, government, and science to help remove the biggest bottlenecks that are inhibiting progress with the most promising natural-system climate interventions. For the fields we choose to tackle, Cascade acts as a field-building hub: coordinating ambitious cross-sector initiatives, creating new tools and infrastructure that accelerate the community’s work on promising solutions, and resourcing critical R&D and policy work. Our approach starts with building deep, trust-based relationships across the entire ecosystem in any given field. 

Cascade’s initial focus has been advancing the development of Enhanced Rock Weathering (ERW) as a promising climate-smart agriculture and carbon removal solution, underpinned by its scientific evidence base and its potential for gigaton-scale, durable carbon dioxide removal. 

About the Role 

We’re looking for an experienced geochemical modeler with comfort developing and parameterizing geochemical models for soil systems. The candidate should be excited to contribute to our work to accelerate the pace of ERW model development and improvement, especially via initiatives that coordinate across the modeling community and the range of models currently being used. While the role will be dynamic and multi-faceted, the candidate should expect to be working with other academic and commercial modelers and coordinating across the community more so than writing and debugging code or performing model runs. The role will involve joining external calls with other modelers in the process of designing and executing our strategy. 

This opportunity is for a part-time consultant, working 10-20 hours per week. This could include academic candidates needing part-time support (professors on sabbatical, soft-money researchers, and outstanding Ph.D. candidates), or experienced geochemical modelers in consulting or industry positions.

• Facilitate collaboration between ERW modeling teams on cross-model initiatives,  benchmarks, and development of standardized best practices for models. 
• Support the development of a capabilities map of existing ERW models, documenting their processes, parameter sets, and key characteristics to improve cross-field understanding.
• Help articulate goals and performance metrics for ERW modeling research, focusing on critical geochemical processes and improving predictive skill for carbon dioxide removal quantification.
• Coordinate between academic ERW modelers and field researchers, organizing input from modelers on measurement protocols and identifying critical parameters for empirical data collection.

• Demonstrated experience using numerical models to advance predictive understanding of soil and/or groundwater (bio)geochemistry.
• Deep understanding of inorganic soil chemistry.
• Comfort with statistical methods, including methods of error propagation in non-linear dynamical systems using frequentist and Bayesian frameworks.
• A Ph.D. or equivalent work history, in earth science, geochemistry, environmental engineering or other allied disciplines.
• A collaborative outlook, demonstrated by past successful participation in and/or leadership of cross-institutional research programs.

• Experience with reactive transport models as well as familiarity with other modeling paradigms (e.g. zero-dimensional box models). 
• Appetite for and experience with experimental design in soil systems to inform model development.
• Knowledge of AI-based approaches to geochemical model development and parameterization. 
• Familiarity with ERW and other geochemical carbon removal approaches.

• Palpably demonstrating the empathy, humility and contagious curiosity that are at the heart of Cascade’s culture. 
• Ability to embrace tension and ‘inhabit’ both sides or perspectives on an issue.
• Comfort working under uncertainty and ambiguity without any clear right answer.
• Naturally high standards and expectations of yourself while avoiding letting “perfect get in the way of really good” so that you can deliver strong work quickly. 

We encourage anyone who is interested in this role to apply, regardless of whether you feel you meet 100% of the qualifications. 

Location    

Cascade is headquartered in Boston and has hubs in Washington D.C., New York City, and the Bay Area. We have a preference for candidates located in one of these four hubs, but candidates working remotely will also be considered.