Career Center

Acknowledgement of Country

CSIRO acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the land, sea and waters, of the area that we live and work on across Australia. We acknowledge their continuing connection to their culture and pay our respects to their Elders past and present. View our vision towards reconciliation

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The Opportunity

• Do you have a PhD in Geochemistry, Chemistry, Physics or Material Science?
• Exciting 3-year postdoctoral opportunity to solve challenges and drive innovation.
• Join CSIRO’s CarbonLock Future Science Platform initiative!

CSIRO Early Research Career (CERC) Postdoctoral Fellowships provide opportunities to scientists and engineers who have completed their doctorate and have less than three years of relevant postdoctoral work experience. These fellowships aim to develop the next generation of future leaders of the innovation system.

Future Science Platforms (FSPs) are an investment in boundary-pushing science that will underpin innovation and has the potential to reinvent and create new industries for Australia. These multi-disciplinary, multi-year initiatives bring together diverse networks of partners – including early career researchers – to build the foundations of tomorrow’s breakthroughs.

Nationally and internationally, reaching net-zero emissions and beyond will require new methods of permanently removing significant amounts of carbon from the atmosphere that are fast, scalable, and responsible. CarbonLock, CSIRO’s Permanent Carbon Locking Future Science Platform (FSP) will address this challenge by driving radical innovation at the nexus of biology, chemistry and engineering in negative emissions technology and their integration to permanently remove atmospheric carbon dioxide in novel and unconventional ways.

We are seeking a CERC Fellow who will conduct molecular simulation of mineral carbonation reactions to provide a molecular-level understanding of CO2-fluid-rock interactions at a wide range of fluid composition, and T-P conditions. The calculated thermodynamic and kinetic properties will help build geochemical and reactive transport modelling to assess the mineral carbonation potential and to design the reaction pathway for an accelerated mineral carbonation process.

Your duties will include:

• Conduct molecular simulations to study the microstructure of the mineral-water interface, and to understand the mechanism and fundamental control (thermodynamics and kinetics) of mineral carbonation reactions.
• Work with experimentalists to combine molecular simulations with mineral replacement experiments to cross-check the available and new experimental results.
• Perform geochemical modelling to assess the mineral carbonation potential and to design the reaction pathway for an accelerated mineral carbonation process.
• Work as part of an interdisciplinary team of researchers, contributing to the collaboration between the CSIRO Mineral Resources and CarbonLock Future Science Platforms (FSP).

Location: Kensington, Perth, WA
Salary: AU$92k - AU$101k plus up to 15.4% superannuation
Tenure: Specified term of 3 years
Reference: 93805