Faculty Professor Research Assistant – Full-Time

The University of Pittsburgh is looking to fill two Research Scientist positions to help design, build, and support cloud-based and high-performance computing analysis frameworks that can store, search, analyze and annotate data of the volume and complexity of the LSST data. These positions are part of the LSST Corporation LINCC Frameworks , an ambitious 5-year program to provide advances in software infrastructure needed to enable the community’s analysis tools to work at the scale and complexity demanded by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) data. These appointments will be made at the rank of non-tenure-stream Research Assistant Professor.  They are being offered at the University of Pittsburgh as part of a partnership with Carnegie Mellon University, one of the LINCC hubs.

LSST will be the flagship ground-based astronomical survey of the 2020s.  With an estimated start date in 2024, LSST will generate the deepest-ever, multi-color, 10-year-long movie of the southern sky, detecting 30 billion stars and galaxies and amassing 100 PB of imaging and catalog data. This is part of a trend of ever-larger and more complex astronomical imaging surveys: science is at an inflection point where the volume of data and the software infrastructure we use to analyze it can fundamentally change our understanding of the universe. The scientific reach of the LSST will be extraordinary, addressing questions such as: how did the Solar System form; what governs the birth and death of stars; how does dark matter sculpt the shape of our Galaxy; what is the nature of the dark energy that drives the expansion of our Universe? 

The LINCC Frameworks will provide interfaces for the astronomical community to run real-time and batch analyses (e.g., to search for one-in-a-million events in continuous streams of data) within the LSST data sets.  We seek computationally talented scientists with a background in astronomy who are ready to work with early adopters of these software platforms.  This 5-year project spans multiple institutions, including the University of Washington, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Pittsburgh.  

As a Research Scientist, you will be contributing to astronomical analyses, working with external researchers to design and implement their analyses, and training the astronomy community to utilize these tools and software. You will be integrally involved in producing, critiquing, improving, and disseminating results. You will work with a team of software engineers and research scientists to develop time domain, extragalactic science, and Solar System analyses, to develop example notebooks, to facilitate testing for specific science use cases, and provide user support to ensure the scientific utility of the products.