The National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center seeks a Data Scientist to join the cyberinfrastructure (CI) team in supporting collaborative, computational, and data-driven socio-environmental research. Our supported science teams and postdoctoral fellows come from many different disciplines and synthesize diverse models and data sets to answer large-scale questions at the intersection of humans and the environment. The Data Scientist will work closely with the CI team to assist scientists in performing data and model syntheses.

The Data Scientist’s typical activities include:

• Advise on statistical approaches, design workflows, and prototype/optimize code;
• Help researchers develop and use custom tools;
• Assess and document project needs;
• Teach in hands-on CI education workshops for students and researchers; and,
• Assist researchers in making their data, code, analyses, and applications open, reproducible, and discoverable.

Candidates with experience in machine learning techniques, code optimization, and/or qualitative data analysis will be given priority consideration.

SESYNC is dedicated to solving society’s most challenging and complex environmental problems by bringing together social, natural, and computational scientists to increase knowledge on the complex interactions between human and ecological systems. The computational requirements for conducting this research present many opportunities and challenges. Examples of the work we have supported include:

• map and analyze a billion-point data set;
• model shocks to the global food trade;
• synthesize global biophysical and governance data on Marine Protected Areas;
• develop R Shiny applications for targeted data exploration and cleaning;
• monitor traffic pertaining to illegal wildlife trade through Google Trends data;
• R packages: developed rslurm to facilitate High Performance Computing (HPC) pipelines and contributed major revisions to codyn to facilitate ecological community analysis

SESYNC’s CI is designed to enable mesoscale research, i.e., research that requires access to large data sets and processing resources but not necessarily traditional HPC. We embrace open source software to the fullest extent possible and support a variety of tools. Our CI staff consists of systems specialists, S-E researchers, and data scientists. All CI staff are encouraged to investigate new technologies they think may be useful or interesting in contributing to SESYNC’s mission.

Using the webform, submit a cover letter, resume, and three professional references as a single PDF. You may include an optional URL to a project portfolio (e.g., your GitHub portfolio, professional website).

Position open until filled. For best consideration, please apply by May 25, 2018.