Post Master's Research Associate - Scientific Data Exploration
About The Position
At PNNL, our core capabilities are divided among major departments that we refer to as Directorates within the Lab, focused on a specific area of scientific research or other function, with its own leadership team and dedicated budget. Our Science & Technology directorates include National Security, Earth and Biological Sciences, Physical and Computational Sciences, and Energy and Environment. In addition, we have an Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, a Department of Energy, Office of Science user facility housed on the PNNL campus. The Physical and Computational Sciences Directorate's (PCSD’s) strengths in experimental, computational, and theoretical chemistry and materials science, together with our advanced computing, applied mathematics and data science capabilities, are central to the discovery mission we embrace at PNNL. But our most important resource is our people—experts across the range of scientific disciplines who team together to take on the biggest scientific challenges of our time. The Advanced Computing, Mathematics, and Data Division (ACMDD) focuses on basic and applied computing research encompassing artificial intelligence, applied mathematics, computing technologies, and data and computational engineering. Our scientists and engineers apply end-to-end co-design principles to advance future energy-efficient computing systems and design the next generation of algorithms to analyze, model, understand, and control the behavior of complex systems in science, energy, and national security.
Requirements
- Candidates must have received a Master’s degree within the past 24 months or within the next 8 months from an accredited college or university.
- Masters degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Applied Mathematics, Electrical Engineering, Computational Engineering, or a closely related field.
- Prior research experience, including internship experience within a national laboratory setting.
- Experience developing or experimenting with agentic systems or machine learning methods in engineering or scientific research applications.
- Experience with developing data pipelines to extract and aggregate relevant information from multiple sources.
- Strong programming experience in C++, and/or Python.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills.
- Experience working in collaborative and interdisciplinary research environments.
Responsibilities
- Aggregate, transform, and integrate structured and unstructured datasets and documents, such as equipment datasheets, from environmental and power grid systems domains into a central, structured database.
- Knowledge of environmental and power grid systems, with experience analyzing and organizing power grid data from a variety of external sources.
- Development and evaluation of large-scale generative AI workflows for material science applications, such as atomic-resolution and hyperspectral data analysis, using multi-agentic systems, tool use, and optimizations for robustness, alignment, and efficiency.
- Design and deploy scalable agentic AI systems with autonomous workflows, dynamic tool use, and complex decision-making to support advanced scientific and operational tasks.
- Design of scalable data systems, including data meshes and knowledge graph-enabled pipelines, to support large-scale scientific and production workflows involving scientific instrumental images, metadata, and attribute-rich data.
- Development and evaluation of DataMesh-style scientific retrieval systems that combine embedding-based vector databases, knowledge graphs, and attribute extraction to enable content-based search and analysis over instrumental images and associated metadata.
Benefits
- health insurance
- flexible work schedules
- medical insurance
- dental insurance
- vision insurance
- robust telehealth care options
- several mental health benefits
- free wellness coaching
- health savings account
- flexible spending accounts
- basic life insurance
- disability insurance
- employee assistance program
- business travel insurance
- tuition assistance
- relocation
- backup childcare
- legal benefits
- supplemental parental bonding leave
- surrogacy and adoption assistance
- fertility support
- company-funded pension plan
- 401 (k) savings plan with company match
- 120 vacation hours per year
- ten paid holidays per year
Stand Out From the Crowd
Upload your resume and get instant feedback on how well it matches this job.
What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Entry Level
Number of Employees
1,001-5,000 employees
