Position of Integrated Assessment Modeler at IIASA, Laxenburg (Austria)

The Integrated Assessment and Climate Change (IACC) Research Group within the Energy, Climate, and Environment (ECE) Program at IIASA (International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis) seeks a strong candidate to help develop and extend the current global modeling framework used within the group. The successful candidate will work with a team of international scientists who also develop and use the framework to perform state-of-the-art scenario modeling and assessment.

The Energy, Climate, and Environment Program (ECE) at IIASA hosts one of the world’s leading global Integrated Assessment Modeling (IAM) teams, and seeks to deepen the understanding of rapid, just, and feasible systems transformations towards environmental, social, and economic sustainability. Interdisciplinary teams within ECE use these and complementary methods to study trade-offs and synergies between multiple policy priorities and objectives, typically across multiple sectors and scales (global, regional, national and subnational). ECE’s scientific outputs inform international and national policy efforts related to climate change (e.g., implementation of the Paris Climate Agreement) and sustainable development (e.g., pursuit of the Sustainable Development Goals).

Over the past few years, the open source integrated assessment modeling platform MESSAGEix has been relaunched with the goal of implementing best practices both from the perspective of research (e.g., transparency, reproducibility) and collaborative software development (e.g., versioning, continuous integration). The MESSAGEix modeling platform is used at IIASA as well as by a range of collaborators with different backgrounds and skills which has led to a growing community that contributes to developing the tool. In addition to the modeling platform, researchers and software developers at ECE are managing a number of open-source tools to facilitate modelling and analysis of climate change mitigation scenarios. These tools and packages are developed in an open, collaborative process implementing best practices of scientific software development. An example for a highly visible tool is the Python package pyam for scenario data analysis and visualization.

The successful candidate for the position will closely collaborate with researchers from the IIASA ECE Program in addressing the following tasks:

• Assist with the development and maintenance of the MESSAGEix global integrated assessment framework according to recognized best practices in scientific software development.
• Identify key new features that support ease of use in developing, deploying, and assessing large-scale scenario campaigns.
• Support the usage of the model framework on High-Throughput Computing (HTC) computational clusters.
• Develop and maintain continuous integration approaches across the framework Toolscape.
• Lead the release cycle of core libraries associated with the framework.
• Provide support to scientific staff colleagues through co-development of new features, identifying needed tests, and performing code review.
• Help develop and proliferate a culture of best practice with respect to scientific software development.
• Contribute to, and lead where feasible, the publication of relevant results in peer-reviewed journals and actively engage in dissemination efforts such as scientific conferences and workshops, stakeholder and policy events.
• Contribute to ongoing and future projects and related deliverables, reports, stakeholder communication and capacity building activities.
• In line with the team spirit that prevails at IIASA, the incumbent may occasionally work on other tasks assigned by their superiors, that might not be directly related to this appointment but where the post holder has relevant experience and skills, and/or a shortage of immediate personnel capabilities requires such.

Applications will be open until filled.

Read the full job announcement