Open Postdoctoral position, faculty mentor Chris Field

Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment and Sustainability Accelerator are launching a joint post-doctoral fellowship position to advance the use of biochar as a wildfire mitigation and carbon removal tool in California. The Post-doctoral Fellow will lead applied research and stakeholder engagement to design a scalable model to determine if biochar can economically reduce wildfire risk, strengthen forest resilience, and deliver durable carbon sequestration with community and environmental co-benefits.

The Fellow will bridge data, operations, and policy to integrate forest-management realities with the use of biochar technology as a wildfire mitigant and ultimately provide analysis to its economic feasibility. This role will characterize the technical and operational foundation, along with societal concerns and opportunities, needed to inform state-level policy adoption and a scalable model for climate-resilient, economically favorable, and community-informed forest management.

Key Responsibilities:

1. Forest Operations & Technical Analysis

• Analyze forest management practices, thinning operations, and biomass utilization pathways in California’s fire-prone landscapes for impact, cost, scale, and operational needs.
• Evaluate operational and cost barriers to biomass recovery, including but not limited to harvesting, transport, permitting, economics, and workforce constraints, differentiating among public (federal, state, local) and private land ownership contexts.
• Assess biochar technologies (yield, emissions, mobility, CapEx/OpEx, and MRV performance) and identify optimal deployment models coupled with learnings from forest management.
• Conduct techno-economic and life-cycle assessments (TEA/LCA) integrating forest operations, logistics, and carbon accounting.
• Identify economics and scaling potential of preferred pathways along with gaps in policy, technology, or communities to implement

2. Community and Stakeholder Engagement

• Engage with local communities, tribal governments, forest collaboratives, and land managers to understand priorities, workforce capacity, and governance challenges.
• Identify how biochar deployment can provide economic opportunities and align with regional wildfire-resilience and “just transition” goals.  Propose how biochar can work alongside current economic opportunities like logging, recreation, ecosystem stewardship, and electricity production to support a beneficial socio-economic framework for California’s forest communities
• Facilitate partnerships with state agencies (CalFire, CARB, CPUC), utilities, and the insurance sector to evaluate co-benefits and potential incentive structures.
• Facilitate workshops and field dialogues that connect technical modeling with the lived realities of managing and restoring Western forests.

3. Scale and Strategy Development

• Identify existing policies which are limiting for successful biochar deployment at scale.
• Define MRV and Credit protocol which can be supported by California policy and existing biochar registries.
• Understand California’s existing biomass utilization and wildfire management budgets, and how this will compliment and/or define what CA’s budget would look like with this operation at scale.
• Develop guidance on cost comparisons with conventional fuels management, air-quality compliance, and carbon-market integration.
• Collaborate with SDSS faculty, colleagues at the Woods Institute and Sustainability Aceclerator,  and external partners to produce reports and presentations for government and industry audiences.