The purpose of the Essel and Menakka Bailey Conservation Fellowship Program is to help develop the conservation leaders of tomorrow. Initiated in 2018, the program is designed to provide recent graduates and early career conservation professionals with the opportunity to work in an environment that combines a deep-dive into a specific conservation project with a broad introduction to major conservation issues and the operations of The Nature Conservancy’s (TNC) organization. In this program, the Fellow will have the opportunity to work with Conservancy Staff across multiple dimensions of the conservation discipline, including science, restoration, policy, land protection, and communications. Furthermore, the Fellowship is flexibly designed to emphasize those experiences the individual wants or needs to prepare them for their conservation career.

For the 2021 Fellowship, The Nature Conservancy is seeking a Fellow that will strengthen the evidence base necessary to advance our conservation efforts in the Northwoods of the Midwest and Upper Great Lakes region, ranging across the northern portions of Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. In this geography, The Nature Conservancy pursues multiple interrelated conservation strategies, including direct conservation of core areas and corridors via acquisitions and easements, advancing natural climate solutions that sequester carbon, improving forest and aquatic system health via habitat management activities, and, more broadly, supporting vibrant recreational and forest products industries that further act to incentivize sustainable forest management. 

Specifically, we are seeking a post-doctoral fellow to create, collect and integrated spatial data that will direct conservation actions across the landscape to achieve multiple ecological, economic, and social outcomes. We are seeking a researcher with strong analytical and interpersonal skills, and, most importantly, creativity and curiosity. As such, the fellow must be skilled at interacting with an interdisciplinary team of researchers and practitioners, both within The Nature Conservancy as well as with partner organizations. Outputs will include spatially explicit data that guide conservation actions as well as scientific reports and publications. The fellow will be co-advised by senior conservation staff at The Nature Conservancy.

The Bailey Fellow will be awarded 18 months of support to work with TNC and partners. The Fellow will be mentored by staff from TNC who will help the Fellow develop and implement Northwoods research projects of priority to TNC. Our intent is to find win-win scenarios for the Fellow and TNC. Fellow will be employed by TNC and administratively based at our Michigan Field Office, in Lansing, MI which is centrally located in the “Great Lakes Research Corridor” with numerous top-ranked universities and conservation science programs located within a 150-mile radius. This is a post-doctoral position that is funded by an outside source with an annual salary of $55,000.