Enhanced Rock Weathering Scientist
Cascade Climate
Boston, MA, USA · San Francisco, CA, USA · New York, USA · Washington, DC, USA
Posted on Sep 21, 2024
About Cascade
Join Cascade Climate, a new global nonprofit accelerating progress in climate interventions that leverage Earth’s natural systems—from soils to oceans to glaciers—to stabilize our climate. As a philanthropically-backed nonprofit, we work across science, industry, and policy to overcome the bottlenecks that are holding back the most promising open-system climate interventions.
Since launching in June 2023, Cascade has organized around three main programmatic pillars: 1) market shaping, 2) accelerating science, and 3) driving policy outcomes. Our initial focus is 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. This year, we are excited to expand into other open system climate intervention pathways, such as marine carbon dioxide removal (mCDR). For more context, you can read our blog post about the outlook for the ERW market or our broader thoughts on leveling the playing field for open-system carbon dioxide removal.
About the Role
As part of our work in ERW, we created Cascade’s flagship program, "Foundations for ERW Quantification," which was the first-ever community-wide process to articulate a shared framework for quantifying net carbon removal from ERW deployments. This program distilled and created alignment around the best available science and practices for quantifying each component of the carbon and cation fluxes in an end-to-end ERW quantification process. It is Cascade’s hope that this “Foundations” document could support the kickoff of a virtuous deployment-driven learning cycle wherein ERW deployments of increasingly larger scale become a powerful engine for closing knowledge gaps, growing public trust, and driving down deployment costs.
In the coming 12 months, you will be a science lead pushing forward our work to help bring the virtuous deployment-driven learning cycle into practice. This could mean a range of different projects; in any given week, you could be doing any one or a subset of the roles listed below depending on your skills and experience.
These are only some of the ideas we have for leveraging ongoing deployments to make progress against remaining knowledge gaps. We are looking for dynamic problem-solvers and doers like yourself to generate new and creative approaches for moving the deployment-driven learning cycle forward!
We care as much about you—your character and mindsets—as we do about your scientific training and background. Do you consistently show up with humility and contagious curiosity? Do you love to build new relationships and work with lots of collaborators? Do you independently learn new things quickly and eagerly? Can you operate without a fully-developed roadmap that’s been handed to you—tackling ambiguous problems and imposing your own structured plan?
Major roles and responsibilities:
- Working alongside practitioners to get into the technical weeds of designing and implementing a measurement plan for an ERW deployment
- Designing, facilitating collaborations, and/or allocating funding for field trial studies that aim to answer the most critical questions on quantifying net removal and assessing human and ecological impacts/risks from ERW deployments
- Conducting meta-analyses and developing case studies that synthesize learnings from ongoing ERW field trials and early-stage commercial deployments—making maximally useful the data sharing system that Cascade is coordinating to build
- Developing useful technical documents and statistical tools that help practitioners implement robust approaches to ERW quantification and uncertainty propagation
Irrespective of the specific subset of projects you are working on at any given time, your specific responsibilities will often include the following:
- Managing and monitoring the execution of complex projects that involve multiple strands (both scientific and operational)
- Building new individual relationships (e.g., with specific researchers) and organizational partnerships for Cascade
- Helping chart Cascade’s ERW strategy - identifying and prioritizing key gaps, and evaluating potential new initiatives
- Whiteboarding new ideas with colleagues and facilitating group problem-solving on knotty, substantive questions
- Interrogating how systems or projects could play out in the real world
- Leaning into conversations with partners who have questions about how some of the systems or projects Cascade is spearheading are playing out in the real world
- Reviewing and helping craft documents—to help Cascade colleagues or partner organizations—that need scrutiny or input from a trained scientist
- Representing Cascade as a participant in multi-organization meetings and various collaborations; attending relevant conferences
- Recruiting talented people to Cascade and/or to new systems or entities that we are helping establish
- Helping Cascade build and deepen its organizational culture, brand, and community trust
Desired Skills and Experiences
- PhD in soil-based (bio)geochemistry, geosciences, or related fields—e.g. know your way around cation sorption dynamics, secondary mineral formation in soils
- Experience with measurement campaigns in soil systems—you have designed sampling plans and collected soil samples, and understand the challenges with field trials and control studies in agronomic systems
- A big bonus if you have direct experience with enhanced rock weathering deployments
- A big bonus if you have direct experience with geochemical modeling frameworks or statistical frameworks as applied to environmental science and soil contexts
- Track record of independently and effectively managing moderately or highly complex analytical projects
- Effective, eager networker and relationship builder
- Strong reputation as a scientific thinker and collaborator
- Skilled written communicator and group facilitator
- Strong aptitude for creative problem solving, and ability to make informed decisions in dynamic, evolving situations
More generally, we think this role could be a good fit if you are
- Excited about the sometimes-complex project management and stakeholder management involved in the kinds of system-engineer / market-shaping initiatives outlined above—and feel you could enjoy and thrive in a role with this flavor
- Consistently considered by others as humble, kind and empathetic
- Good at building new relationships across a wide variety of people grounded in trust and deep listening
- Comfortable working under uncertainty and a lack of any clear right answer
- Intensely curious, hungry and self-driven in your learning about new topics
- An open-minded, flexible, and sharp thinker who thrives in highly collaborative problem-solving environments
If this broadly describes you, we think you’ll feel at home here, and will join a team of experienced and passionate people who will take great care to support you and your continued growth. No one will perfectly meet everything in the description above - we encourage anyone who is interested in this role to apply, regardless of whether you feel you meet 100% of the qualifications. We offer professional learning and training opportunities to help you develop skills you may not have had the opportunity to cultivate yet.
Location
Candidates must be based in or willing to relocate to one of Cascade’s hubs. Cascade is headquartered in Boston and has hubs in Washington D.C., New York City, and the Bay Area. We are a hybrid workplace, in-office a couple days a week out of a shared co-working space or our Boston headquarters.
We love seeing each other in person. We gather regularly for team time like retreats, learning experiences, and whiteboarding sessions. Be ready to travel at least once per month—and occasionally a bit more as needed—for conferences, team gatherings, and partner meetings.
Diversity
At Cascade, our mission is to dramatically accelerate progress across a range of open-system climate interventions in order to ensure a healthy, livable Earth for all humanity. Recruiting, hiring, mentoring, and retaining a diverse workforce that reflects the communities we serve is critical to our success. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or status as a protected veteran. Cascade is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.
Cascade is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.
Work Authorization:
Please note that Cascade Climate is unable to sponsor H-1B work visas for this role. Candidates must be legally authorized to work in the United States without the need for H-1B visa sponsorship at the time of application.