Postdoctoral Fellow

Johns Hopkins, founded in 1876, is America's first research university and home to nine world-class academic divisions working together as one university. Salary : $75,000 - $85,000 Johns Hopkins University: Whiting School of Engineering: Office of Research and Translation Description PREP Research Associate This position is part of the National Institute of Standards (NIST) Professional Research Experience (PREP) program. NIST recognizes that its research staff may wish to collaborate with researchers at academic institutions on specific projects of mutual interest, thus requires that such institutions must be the recipient of a PREP award. The PREP program requires staff from a wide range of backgrounds to work on scientific research in many areas. Employees in this position will perform technical work that underpins the scientific research of the collaboration. Research Title Decision Science and Computational Methods for Community Resilience The work will entail The associate will support NIST Community Resilience research by developing methods to standardize, integrate, and analyze heterogeneous field data used to characterize infrastructure, community conditions, and resilience outcomes. The work will focus on creating consistent data structures, metadata, data dictionaries, quality-control procedures, and reproducible computational workflows that allow data collected across field studies, communities, and time periods to be compared and combined. Data may include mobile or fixed sensor measurements, time-series data, accelerometer and gyroscope measurements, GPS or other geospatial information, infrastructure observations, surveys, interviews, and other qualitative records. The associate will also investigate machine-learning and natural-language-processing methods for extracting entities, relationships, and causal information from field and interview data and linking those representations with quantitative measurements. The research will contribute to field-data collection strategies, interoperable data products, analytical prototypes, technical documentation, reports, and presentations for NIST researchers and external collaborators. Key responsibilities will include but are not limited to Develop and evaluate standardized schemas, metadata elements, controlled vocabularies, data dictionaries, provenance records, and quality-control rules for multimodal community resilience field data, including sensor, geospatial, infrastructure, survey, and interview data. Design reproducible workflows to ingest, clean, validate, synchronize, link, transform, and version heterogeneous data sources, with particular attention to integrating time-series sensing and location data with contextual or qualitative information. Support the design and analysis of field-data collection activities, including mobile or smartphone-based sensing and infrastructure monitoring using measurements such as acceleration, angular motion, location, sound, or related environmental and operational signals. Develop and test statistical, machine-learning, and natural-language-processing methods to classify observations and extract entities, relationships, and causal structures from unstructured records such as interviews or transcripts, and connect these outputs to structured field datasets. Develop research software or analytical prototypes, communicate findings in internal and stakeholder meetings and technical publications, and ensure that datasets, code, protocols, model outputs, and documentation are reproducible and archived for use by the larger NIST research program. U.S. Citizens are Preferred Qualifications § A PhD degree, or current PhD candidacy with all degreerequirements completed except the dissertation(all-but-dissertation/ABD), in Computational Science, Data Science,Computer Science, Engineering, Applied Mathematics, Systems andControl, or a closely related field. § Three or more years of relevant research or professionalexperience applying computational methods to heterogeneousscientific, engineering, infrastructure, transportation, orfield-collected data. § Demonstrated experience with multimodal sensing or time-seriesdata, preferably including accelerometer, gyroscope,GPS/geospatial, acoustic, smartphone, or related field measurementsused for infrastructure or transportation monitoring. § Experience developing machine-learning or statistical methods forclassification, inference, data fusion, or pattern discovery acrossheterogeneous data sources, together with the ability to prototypereproducible data-processing and analysis workflows. § Experience with natural-language processing orlanguage-model-based methods for entity and relationshipclassification, information extraction, causal-model extraction, oranalysis of interviews, transcripts, or other unstructured text ishighly desirable. § Proficiency with programming and scripting tools used incomputational research, along with familiarity with versioncontrol, reproducible research practices, structured documentation,and collaborative software or data workflows. § Strong oral and written communication skills demonstrated throughinterdisciplinary research collaboration, technical presentations,publications, workshops, or mentoring, and the ability to workeffectively with NIST researchers and external stakeholders. Privacy Act Statement Authority 15 U.S.C. § 278g-1(e)(1) and (e)(3) and 15 U.S.C.§ 272(b) and (c) Purpose The National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) hosts the Professional Research Experience Program (PREP) which is designed to provide valuable laboratory experience and financial assistance to undergraduates, post-bachelor’s degree holders, graduate students, master’s degree holders, postdocs, and faculty. PREP is a 5-year cooperative agreement between NIST laboratories and participating PREP Universities to establish a collaborative research relationship between NIST and U.S. institutions of higher education in the following disciplines including (but may not be limited to) biochemistry, biological sciences, chemistry, computer science, engineering, electronics, materials science, mathematics, nanoscale science, neutron science, physical science, physics, and statistics. This collection of information is needed to facilitate the administrative functions of the PREP Program. Routine Uses NIST will use the information collected to perform the requisite reviews of the applications to determine eligibility, and to meet programmatic requirements. Disclosure of this information is also subject to all the published routine uses as identified in the Privacy Act System of Records Notices: NIST-1:NIST Associates. Disclosure Furnishing this information is voluntary. When you submit the form, you are indicating your voluntary consent for NIST to use of the information you submit for the purpose stated. By applying to a CHIPS-funded PREP opportunity, you also acknowledge that participation in the project requires signing a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) prior to beginning any work. 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