This fall, NSF’s Division of Ocean Sciences intends to announce a funding opportunity for Postdoctoral Research Fellowships to provide opportunities for scientists early in their careers to work within and across traditional disciplinary lines, develop partnerships, and avail themselves of unique resources, sites, and facilities. The fellowship program will provide beginning investigators of significant potential with experiences that will further prepare them for positions of leadership in the scientific community. During their PRF tenure, fellows will affiliate with an appropriate research institution(s) and conduct research on topics supported by OCE. NSF is committed to supporting early career researchers during the national crisis created by the COVID19 pandemic. The pandemic has put the country’s academic enterprise under extreme duress. The human impact on all academic members is acute, but especially so for graduate students and early-career scientists. The OCE PRF program will provide important employment options for early career scientists. OCE anticipates awarding about fifteen Postdoctoral Fellowships with approximate start dates of mid 2021 or later. The OCE PRF will emphasize strong scientific merit in a field of science supported by the Division of Ocean Sciences and will require letters of support from a mentor(s). The purview of OCE includes a diversity of disciplinary and cross-disciplinary areas. Projects that make use of existing data, including data archived though NSF-supported data centers such as the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), the Biological and Chemical Oceanography Data Management Office (BCO-DMO), and the sites hosted by the Interdisciplinary Earth Data Alliance (IEDA), such as the Marine Geoscience Data System (MGDS), and EarthChem, are encouraged. Information regarding the OCE PRF funding opportunity will be available this fall via the NSF website.