University of São Paulo - Polytechnic School (EP-USP)

The Polytechnic School (Escola Politécnica) of the University of São Paulo (USP) is one of the largest and most prestigious engineering schools in Latin America, with over a century of history in education and research. EP-USP hosts graduate programs across all major engineering fields and is home to internationally recognized research groups in materials science, energy systems, electronic engineering, and computational methods. USP is consistently ranked among the top universities in Latin America and is the largest public research university in Brazil.

This position is part of the SHARP Thematic Project (FAPESP 2024/08341-6), a multidisciplinary initiative combining paleomagnetism, seismic tomography, mineral physics, and geodynamo modeling to investigate the South Atlantic Magnetic Anomaly and its deep-Earth origins, in collaboration with the Institute of Astronomy, Geophysics and Atmospheric Sciences (IAG-USP).

We invite applications for a Postdoctoral Research Associate position at the University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil, within Work Package 3 (WP3) of the SHARP Thematic Project (FAPESP 2024/08341-6). The successful candidate will develop a quantitative pipeline connecting an ab initio thermodynamic database of lower-mantle mineral phases to global seismic tomography, delivering laterally varying core-mantle boundary (CMB) heat flux maps for geodynamo simulations targeting the South Atlantic Magnetic Anomaly (SAMA).

Responsibilities include: (i) interfacing an ab initio Mie-Grüneisen-Debye database with the MAGEMin Gibbs energy minimizer and BurnMan
for the NCMASF₃ lower-mantle system, incorporating iron spin crossover (ISC) thermodynamics and Pv–PPv two-phase coexistence; (ii) training a Mixture Density Network (MDN) emulator on 10⁶ thermodynamic forward evaluations; (iii) implementing a global 3-D MCMC Bayesian inversion of the SPARTANS tomographic model to generate posterior distributions of temperature, composition, and mineral phase fractions; (iv) computing the CMB heat flux map q_CMB(θ,φ) for delivery to the MARATHON geodynamo sub-project; and (v) performing a Sobol' variance decomposition to quantify uncertainty sources in the final heat flux model.

The position is funded by FAPESP (Processo 2024/08341-6) for 24 months, with a mandatory 12-month BEPE-FAPESP research internship abroad: 12 months at Columbia University (USA), under supervision of Prof. Renata Wentzcovitch (ab initio database).

Supervisors: Prof. João Francisco Justo Filho (EP-USP, supervisor) and Prof. Carlos Alberto Moreno Chaves (IAG-USP, co-supervisor).

The fellowship includes a monthly stipend and research contingency funds according
to FAPESP guidelines (www.fapesp.br/en/postdoc).

Send the following documents to joao.justo@usp.br with subject line
"PostDoc SHARP Task 21 - [Your name]":
(1) Full CV with publication list and ORCID;
(2) Motivation letter describing relevant experience (max. 1 page);
(3) Copy of PhD diploma or completion certificate;
(4) Contact information for two academic references.

Shortlisted candidates will be contacted for an online interview.