Research Associate: Statistical Scientist

Research Associate:
Statistical Scientist

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology is the world's leading resource for conservation, research, education, and citizen science focused on birds. The Lab is a unit within Cornell's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, where full‑time faculty and other renowned professionals direct twelve world‑class, mission‑driven programs. The Center for Avian Population Studies (CAPS) is one of the major programmatic units at the Lab, collecting and disseminating biodiversity data to enhance the information and decision‑making tools available to conservationists and scientific researchers.

We achieve this by producing scientific, computational, and big data resources that transform how we understand and protect the world around us.

The Cornell Lab is home to a vibrant community of several research associates working across all twelve programs. We strive to provide a supportive and collaborative environment for this community that fosters personal growth and career advancement. The Lab is an inclusive community, and we recognize that diverse, inclusive communities create more innovative and impactful work to address global challenges and benefit humanity and nature.

The Cornell Lab is committed to fostering and sustaining a healthy workplace that values diverse and inclusive perspectives and backgrounds and supports growth and advancement opportunities. The Lab believes that every team member enriches our diversity by exposing us to a broad range of ways to understand and engage with the world, identify challenges, and discover, design, and deliver solutions.

The goal of the eBird Status and Trends (S&T) project is to use the information collected by the global participatory science project, eBird, to become the go‑to source for publicly available high‑quality, high‑resolution visualizations, data products, and tools for describing where bird populations occur and how they change through time. To translate eBird observations into robust data products we create custom modeling workflows designed to fill spatiotemporal gaps based on remote sensing data while controlling for the biases inherent in species observations collected by volunteers.

The workflows generate estimates of species’ distributions and abundance, measure how they change over time, and identify the features of the environment associated with populations. Leveraging the broad coverage and fine scale of eBird, these estimates are generated with high resolution across global extents making it possible to address a wide variety of important ecological and conservation applications.

We are seeking a Statistical Scientist to join the Status and Trends (S&T) research team at the Center for Avian Population Studies (CAPS). The desired candidate is an individual excited to address the modeling challenges necessary to develop novel ecological insights and information, data products, and tools. The focus of this position is to develop methods to disentangle dynamic, multiscale ecological signals from large, heterogeneous observational data.

This work lies at the interface of statistics, machine learning/AI, ecology, and conservation and spans a range of activities from exploratory analysis, visualization, and discovery to prediction, validation, quantification of uncertainty, and inference.

The Statistical Scientist will join a highly collaborative research team to accelerate and extend ongoing research efforts (including DL‑based joint species distribution modeling and causal machine learning) and lead methods development to address novel challenges. This position will also collaborate closely with the CAPS scientists to apply research results to advance scientific and conservation…