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:
Software for Digital Traceability
The work will entail:
The candidate will contribute to developing software for data provenance and uncertainty analysis, which will serve as a proof-of-concept for a new system for NIST and other NMIs to deliver trustworthy data that are traceable to primary standards, along with detailed metadata that will help end users to correctly interpret and reuse the data in other contexts. This software will entail:
- Schema to organize measured data, provenance, uncertainties, and correlations.
- Libraries to read/write these data and propagate uncertainties.
- A searchable data repository for traceable data.
Key responsibilities will include but are not limited to:
- Work with project members and mentors to identify, analyze, model, and implement process-descriptions/use-cases into technical workflows, schemas (in JSON and/or XML), and other tools, as directed by the project.
- Partner with different team members who might need to collaborate to prototype, implement, integrate, evaluate, optimize, and/or scale various kinds of reference-implementations of RF-related calculations, uncertainty-related computations, etc.
- Work with a team to deploy, use, and customize web-applications like the CDCS (ref1, ref2) per the guidance and collaboration with the team and mentors3
Qualifications
- [List minimum required qualifications here. If including preferred qualification, note as such]
- Master’s degree in computer science or a related field.
- Experience that shows mature, flexible, self-driven software engineering capabilities in the context of an agile software development process.
- Direct experience with Python, full stack web development, Docker, and Git.
- Flexibility and willingness to try or learn new technical approaches/strategies, as the team considers needs for working with new tools, techniques, formats, etc.
- Willingness and ability to learn statistics well enough to understand the relationships between existing software packages (as opposed to developing new techniques).
- Willingness and ability to learn radio-frequency and optical physics, at a sufficient level to interface with existing algorithms used by researchers (as opposed to developing new techniques).
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.
SURA is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We believe that no one should be discriminated against because of their differences, such as age, disability, ethnicity, gender, gender identity and expression, religion, or sexual orientation. All employment decisions shall be made without regard to age, race, creed, color, religion, sex, national origin, ancestry, disability status, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, citizenship status, or any other basis as protected by federal, state, or local law.
PREP0003022