George Pau and Nathan Urban have been selected, along with 63 other recipients, by the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Science as Early Career Research Program award winners for 2013. Each winner will receive monetary funds from DOE's Earth System Modeling program over a period of five years to explore ways to advance their research focus.

Pau, a computational scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, studies high-performance computing, model reduction, and optimization of algorithms relevant to Earth sciences. He was funded to work on his proposal, “A Multiscale Reduced Order Method for Integrated Earth System Modeling.”

Urban, energy security fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory, focuses his research on climate prediction and uncertainty quantification. He won funding for his proposal, “Beyond the Black Box: Combining System and Model Dynamics to Learn about Climate Uncertainties.”

The call for 2014 research applications is now open. The DOE Climate and Environmental Sciences Division is only accepting proposals in the area of the water cycle, with particular emphasis on process-level experimental, analysis, or modeling studies that indicate a clear path toward the incorporation of improved process-level understanding into Earth system models.

Principal Investigators (PI) who received doctorates no earlier than 2003 are eligible to apply. They must be full-time, permanent, non-postdoctoral national laboratory employees, or untenured assistant or associate professors on the tenure track as of the proposal deadline.

Key deadlines are:

• Pre-proposals are due on or before September 5, 2013, at 5:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time.
• Successful pre-applicants will be requested by DOE to submit a full proposal, due on or before November 19, 2013, at 5:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.

Each PI may submit only one Office of Science Early Career Research Program proposal per annual competition and should request project support for five years. In addition, a PI may not participate in more than three Office of Science Early Career Research Program competitions.

The DOE Office of Science website contains more information about the Early Career Research Program and an FAQ about the submission process. Awards are expected to begin in FY2014.