RESEARCH SCIENTIST/ENGINEER PRINCIPAL

As a UW employee, you have a unique opportunity to change lives on our campuses, in our state and around the world. UW employees offer their boundless energy, creative problem-solving skills and dedication to build stronger minds and a healthier world.

UW faculty and staff also enjoy outstanding benefits, professional growth opportunities and unique resources in an environment noted for diversity, intellectual excitement, artistic pursuits and natural beauty.

The mission of the eScience Institute at the University of Washington is to empower researchers and students in all fields to answer fundamental questions through the use of large, complex, and noisy data. As the hub of data-intensive discovery on campus, the Institute leads a community of innovators in the techniques, technologies, and best practices of data science and the fields that depend on them.  The Institute does this by bringing expertise and helping researchers at UW to leverage data science tools, methods, and best practices in their research and in their grant proposals.  As data science experts and, in collaboration with faculty at UW, the Institute advances the state-of-the-art in data science methods and in domain sciences that benefit from them. The eScience Institute shares President Cauce’s commitment to combat inequities and racism. The values of diversity, equity and inclusion are integral to the success of our research enterprise and are embedded in the culture of who we are as an institution and employer.

The eScience Institute is seeking outstanding candidates for the position of Research Scientist/Engineer Principal.

Reporting to the eScience Director, the eScience Institute is seeking a creative, collaborative leader with extensive research experience to guide and develop sponsored research, contribute expertise to collaborators' research proposals, and act as an investigator and/or principal investigator on related research; lead the development of the eScience Institute’s hackweek-as-a-service program; lead participate in each hackweek event; and engage with clients and stakeholders across multiple universities, non-profit, industry and the general public in communicating hackweek goals and services available to the community.

Hackweeks are participant driven events that provide hands-on collaborative learning experiences in open science. This position will be responsible for facilitating hackweeks to support collaborative research of major societal importance using open and reproducible tools. This position will supervise the University of Washington’s eScience Institute’s new hackweek-as-a-service program, and will plan, develop, coordinate and direct new programs and infrastructure that support data intensive research both within UW and in partnership with community organizations. The position will also ensure that institutional values of inclusion, equity, community engagement and open science are upheld.

The individual in this position will conduct research on the efficacy of evidence-based pedagogical methods for data science training. They will oversee the selection, development and implementation of cloud computing technologies that support data intensive workflows. They will network nationally and internationally to maintain knowledge of community research needs, and propose and lead new initiatives that enable collaboration and innovation across multiple disciplines. Using their deep experience as a Principal Investigator on their own sponsored research, the individual in this position will leverage that reputation to attract major funding to support eScience Institute program development, including hackweeks.

RESPONSIBILITIES:
Guide and develop sponsored research, contribute expertise to collaborators' research proposals, and act as an investigator and/or principal investigator on related research: (50%)
• Contribute to open source software and take a supervisory role in building open source libraries that emerge from participant driven hackweeks.
• Develop websites that enable collaborators to build and design computing tools that meet their disciplinary needs.
• Utilize deep knowledge of one or more data intensive methods (machine learning, analysis of large and heterogeneous datasets, etc.) to contribute to collaborative research on one or more areas of the physical sciences.
• Use quantitative and qualitative evaluation data collected from participant driven events to research the efficacy of training and learning model interventions in data science.
• Link the needs of research communities with associated computational infrastructure needed to support data intensive workflows.
• Serve as a primary resource to UW in identifying the research portfolio of sponsors applying to the new UW Scientific Software Engineering Center (SSEC), and link UW eScience research software engineering resources to the needs of sponsors and will identify research trends and emerging opportunities.
• Expand collaborations with a global community of hackweek organizers and researchers and publish findings in peer-reviewed articles.

Lead the development of the eScience Institute’s hackweek-as-a-service program: (20%)
• Supervise the organizing team (approximately 10 people) in developing teaching, community building and technological resources that can be scaled to support a variety of hackweeks.
• Create standardized website and Jupyter Notebook templates for use by hackweek organizers and tutorial developers.
• Oversee the development of tools that automate typical organizational workflows and perform quality checks on hackweek technical content.
• Manage team resources and guide allocation of time spent on each hackweek.
• Ensure core values of diversity, equity and inclusion inform program activities including participant selection process and conduct within each event.

Lead / participate in each hackweek event: (20%)
• Act as main point of contact with new clients, helping them get clear on event objectives and connecting them with eScience resources.
• Lead the acquisition of new contracts that fund individual events.
• Manage and decide on allocation of funds for existing contracts.
• Facilitate team meetings and participant interactions before, during and after a hackweek.
• Lead the evaluation and assessment of program efficacy; guide the development of mentor training programs that evolve after an event for continued project development.
• Teach a portion of hackweek content as appropriate.

Engage with clients and stakeholders across multiple universities, non-profit, industry and the general public in communicating hackweek goals and services available to the community: (10%)
• Seek new opportunities for making our programs accessible to underrepresented universities and colleges.
• Act as main point of contact on the UW campus to link our services to emerging needs across campus.

REQUIRED
• PhD in Physical/Computational Science or a related field.
• At least 8 years of broad experience as a principal investigator on sponsored research projects.
• Experience developing software to conduct research in the physical sciences; demonstrated ability to develop scientific workflows that are open and reproducible; has a record of research that includes data intensive methods (big data queries, cloud computing, statistical methods, machine learning).
• A record of teaching that includes courses focused on computation and data science education. Experience with curriculum design and best practices for teaching computational topics in an interactive setting.
• Fluency with Python or R, command line interfaces, version control and Jupyter Notebooks.
• Experience in deploying commercial cloud systems (AWS/Google Cloud Platform/Microsoft Azure) to support data storage, query, web services or other distributed computing tools.
• Experience with containerized applications (e.g. Docker), Infrastructure-as-a-service (e.g. Terraform) and scalable computational environments (e.g. JupyterHub), especially as these apply to supporting educational and collaborative environments.
• Ability to design and edit HTML5 web content using themes (e.g. Bootstrap). Fluency with markdown and documentation tools (e.g. Sphinx).
• Experience with managing budgets to support research and education.
• Experience in team leadership and personnel management. Capable of designing new programs to meet the needs of multiple stakeholders. Experience in community building and group facilitation.

Equivalent education and/or experience may substitute for minimum requirements.

DESIRED
• Previous experience organizing and leading hackweek events.
• Previous experience working in a university setting.

CONDITIONS OF EMPLOYMENT
The application process for UW positions may include completion of a variety of online assessments to obtain additional information that will be used in the evaluation process. These assessments may include Work Authorization, Cover Letter and/or others. Any assessments that you need to complete will appear on your screen as soon as you select “Apply to this position”. Once you begin an assessment, it must be completed at that time; if you do not complete the assessment, you will be prompted to do so the next time you access your “My Jobs” page. If you select to take it later, it will appear on your "My Jobs" page to take when you are ready. Please note that your application will not be reviewed, and you will not be considered for this position until all required assessments have been completed.