RESEARCH SCIENTIST/ ENGINEER 2

RESEARCH SCIENTIST / ENGINEER 2

As a UW employee, you have a unique opportunity to change lives on our campuses, in our state and around the world. UW employees offer their boundless energy, creative problem solving skills and dedication to build stronger minds and a healthier world.

UW faculty and staff also enjoy outstanding benefits, professional growth opportunities and unique resources in an environment noted for diversity, intellectual excitement, artistic pursuits and natural beauty.

The College of the Environment has an outstanding opportunity for a Research Scientist Engineer 2.

This position will provide support to a NOAA research project on combined uncrewed systems. The project aims at developing uncrewed system capability of automated detection of each other’s locations and following each other in motion.

This position will work as part of a larger team of University of Washington and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists and engineers working to enhance our ability to collect high-quality observations of essential ocean, surface and atmospheric variables in the air-sea transition zone (ocean and atmospheric boundary layers and surface) with a combination of novel and proven technologies, including uncrewed platforms.

A focus of this project is on improving our ability to monitor air-sea interactions in extreme conditions that have been historically under-sampled, such as hurricanes and Arctic (or Antarctic) sea-ice zones.

Team work has the objectives of making key observations available to forecast centers in real time, as well as using the observations collected by our observing systems to evaluate numerical forecast model performance and improve our scientific understanding of socio-economically important air-sea interaction processes.

DUTIES & RESPONSIBILITIES

The responsibilities specific to this position include :

1) Developing software and hardware applications to be applied to underwater gliders, uncrewed surface vehicles, and aerial drones that allow the platforms to identify each other’s locations and track one another in a way that provides the information needed to implement automated co-navigation systems, running on the processors installed on the vehicles, which enable their trajectories / motion to be coordinated with one another for optimal sampling of the air-sea transition zone (surface plus ocean and atmospheric boundary layers) in extreme environments such as Arctic ice zones and tropical cyclones (25%)

2) Testing, evaluating, and eventually improving the system performance based on performance data collected from annual, or sub-annual deployments of the vehicles in oceanic regions of interest ( Bering Sea, Arctic, Tropical-subtropical western Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico). (20%)

3) Prepare uncrewed systems for field observations on land and onboard research cruises (including shipping and other logistics);

collect and archive data from the deployed systems leveraging established data delivery methods for sensors already in use, or implementing new data delivery paths for new sensors (15%)

4) Participate in data analysis by aiding quality control, processing and visualization of the raw data collected by the platforms, with opportunity for more extensive data-driven research as time and skill sets permit (20%)

5) Upon gaining expertise with the deployment, management and data curation of these missions, the applicant will be expected to help train other team members to perform these tasks as group deployment of the uncrewed systems expand (10%)

6) Assist the preparation of research outcome reports in the form of research papers, technical papers and talks, which require description of the systems developed and deployed by the applicant, as well as basic data visualization and statistical analysis (10%)

MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS :

• Bachelor’s degree in a Science-Technology-Engineering-Math (STEM)-related field and two years of relevant experience OR Equivalent combination of education / experience.
• Relevant experience includes oceanographic, atmospheric and computer science and engineering necessary for deploying, piloting and analyzing data from uncrewed systems that collect measurements at the ocean surface, and within the oceanic and atmospheric boundary layers.

Equivalent education / experience will substitute for all minimum qualifications except when there are legal requirements, such as a license / certification / registration.

ADDITIONAL REQUIREMENTS :

• Proficiency in Python or other computing languages; experience of processing data and plotting,
• Piloting uncrewed vehicles, system control, numerical modeling

Other

This position is H1B Sponsorship eligible.