Assistant Research Scientist; PREP

Assistant Research Scientist (PREP
0003947)

This position is part of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Professional Research Experience Program (PREP). NIST recognizes that its research staff may wish to collaborate with researchers at academic institutions on specific projects of mutual interest and 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 Software Engineer

The applicant who is selected for this position will be part of a team of engineers and researchers conducting research and development (R&D) activities focused on accelerating the development and deployment of real-world test methodology to evaluate communications protocols in Uncrewed Aircraft Systems (UAS) for first responder solutions.

• Conduct a literature review and document criteria for drone communications simulator solutions and the datasets that are used to train and test them.
• Prepare industry landscape identifying long‑range communications, mesh networking, and best practices on developing methodologies of communications technologies.
• Develop a software program for a new drone communications simulator platform or to retrofit an existing platform, integrating radio hardware communications 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 the 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 what datasets could be used to train and test them, as well as identify technology challenges and gaps to address.

• A Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, or a related field
• Knowledge of network communications, network routing, and radio signaling
• Knowledge of robotics, UAS, or autonomous software programming (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)
• Knowledge of data structures, formats, and software coding curation processes
• Experience with 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

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. Not all candidates will be eligible for the upper end of the salary range. The actual compensation offered to the selected candidate may vary and will ultimately depend on multiple factors, which may include the successful candidate's geographic location, skills, work experience, internal equity, market conditions, education/training and other factors, as reasonably determined by the University.

Johns Hopkins offers a total rewards package that supports our employees' health, life, career and retirement.

The 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.