Assistant Research Scientist; PREP

This position is part of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Professional Research Experience Program (PREP). It involves collaborating with NIST and Johns Hopkins University on research in drone communications simulation for unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), supporting first responder solutions.

Salary Range: $47,000 – $67,000. The referenced salary range represents the minimum and maximum salaries for this position and is based on Johns Hopkins University's good faith belief at the time of posting. The actual compensation offered to the selected candidate may vary and will ultimately depend on multiple factors, including geographic location, skills, experience, internal equity, market conditions, education/training, and other factors as reasonably determined by the University.

• Conduct a literature review and document criteria for drone communications simulator solutions and the datasets used to train and test them.
• Prepare an industry landscape identifying long‑range communications, mesh networking, and best practices for developing communication technologies.
• Develop a software program for a new drone communications simulator platform or retrofit an existing platform, integrating radio hardware communication components.
• Develop open‑source code and processes.
• Create and collect measurement data for the drone simulator.
• Document the dataset curation process for public use and determine target public‑safety datasets and dataset enhancement options.
• Participate in public‑safety working groups and stakeholder testing to compare simulations with live UAS flights and curate shared information from collaborators.
• Evaluate drone simulator use cases and identify datasets that could be used to train and test them, as well as technology challenges and gaps to address.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, or a related field.
• Knowledge of network communications, routing, and radio signaling.
• Knowledge of robotics, UAS, or autonomous software programming (e.g., PX4, Ardu Pilot, Air Sim, MAVLink).
• Knowledge of software engineering for virtual simulation applications.
• Experience with modern AI tools and applications (AWS, GCP, Azure, MLFlow, SQL, Big Query, Snowflake).
• Experience in development and manipulation of software code, such as Python, C, C++, Qt, JavaScript.
• Knowledge of data structures, formats, and software coding curation processes.
• Experience developing open‑source code, identifying use cases, and evaluating dataset quality and representativeness.
• Knowledge of mathematical probability and statistics, and optimization methods.
• Knowledge of machine learning, including supervised and unsupervised learning, deep learning, and model evaluation.
• Knowledge of dataset biases and labeling issues.
• Knowledge of translating operational needs into solvable radio‑signal or networking problems.
• US Citizens preferred.

• Johns Hopkins offers a total rewards package that supports health, life, career and retirement. More information can be found at (Use the "Apply for this Job" box below)..

Johns Hopkins University is committed to equal opportunity for its faculty, staff, and students. The university does not discriminate on the basis of sex, gender, marital status, pregnancy, race, color, ethnicity, national origin, age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran status or other legally protected characteristic. The university is committed to providing qualified individuals access to all academic and employment programs, benefits and activities on the basis of demonstrated ability, performance and merit without regard to personal factors that are irrelevant to the program involved.