Part Time Research Assistant Data Scientist and Engineer
Listed on 2026-09-12
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IT/Tech
Data Scientist, AI Engineer (Applied/Software), Data Analyst
About American University
American University is a student-centered research institution located in Washington, DC, with highly-ranked schools and colleges, internationally-renowned faculty, and a reputation for creating meaningful change in the world.
Job SummarySummary:
This part-time research assistant position will hold the functional title, Research Data Scientist and Engineer. The Research Data Scientist and Engineer position supports the design, development, and analytical infrastructure of the CRPD Disability Rights Dashboard (https://idpp-crpd-dashboard.share.connect.posit.cloud) which is a first-of-its-kind NLP- and AI-powered platform that makes the full UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) reporting cycle searchable, visual, and actionable.
With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) through the American University Translating Research into Action Center (TRAC), the dashboard will scale to include data and analyses for all nine-core human rights treaties and implementation/monitoring communities. This position integrates data science, software engineering, and applied research, contributing to the analytical methods that generate insight from UN treaty body documents and the technical systems that deliver those insights to users.
Functions
Computational Research and Data Science/Analytics Design, develop, and refine NLP and text analysis pipelines for processing UN treaty body documents, State Party reports, Committee concluding observations, and related human rights records. Compute quantitative and qualitative indicators from structured and unstructured data sources, including keyword-based text analysis, sentiment analysis, and thematic classification across CRPD articles. Build and maintain data ingestion, cleaning, and transformation workflows to ensure the dashboard reflects current and accurate treaty body data.
Conduct exploratory data analysis to identify trends, patterns, and anomalies in CRPD implementation and reporting across 190+ States Parties. Support the expansion of analytical methods to additional UN core human rights treaties beyond the CRPD.
Dashboard and Software Development Build, maintain, and enhance the Streamlit-based CRPD Disability Rights Dashboard, including front-end UI components, interactive visualizations, and data filtering systems. Manage the codebase architecture, ensuring clean separation between data-loading logic (src/ modules) and presentation layers in alignment with the project's code organization conventions. Manage deployment, infrastructure, and configuration on Posit Connect Cloud, including monitoring performance, troubleshooting deployment issues, and coordinating version upgrades.
Implement version control best practices using Git and Git Hub, including branch management, pull request workflows, and code review processes. Support user testing and iterative design improvements based on feedback from stakeholders, including UN delegates, advocates, and researchers.
AI/ML Research and Development Collaborate on the development and refinement of AI-assisted research features, including the AI Research Assistant powered by large language models (LLMs). Design and implement semantic search capabilities using sentence-transformers, FAISS indexing, and embedding-based retrieval over treaty body document corpora. Evaluate and integrate emerging AI/ML tools and techniques relevant to the dashboard's analytical mission, including prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and model evaluation.
Support the development of model performance evaluation frameworks to assess the accuracy and reliability of AI-generated research outputs.
Research, Writing, and Dissemination Support Contribute to the preparation of research reports, policy briefs, and academic publications that draw on dashboard data and analyses. Develop and render Quarto-based reports for project documentation, grant reporting, and research dissemination. Support presentations and demonstrations of the dashboard at academic conferences, UN convenings (including the Conference of States Parties (COSP) to the CRPD), and partner institution briefings.
Contribute to grant progress reports and documentation required by the National Science Foundation and American University TRAC.
Instructional Research Integrity Support Contribute to maintaining the research protocols and data protection responsibilities included in the approved proposal to the American…
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