Senior Principal Scientist

University of Washington•Boston, MA

4d•Onsite

About The Position

The Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) has an outstanding opportunity for a Senior Principal Scientist to join the Environmental and Information Systems Department. This is a full-time Massachusetts-based position. Reporting to the Senior Principal Oceanographer, the Senior Principal Scientist will support research that is focused on advancing the fundamental understanding and practical application of underwater acoustic signal transmission, propagation, detection, and exploitation in the ocean environment. These efforts investigate the complex interactions between acoustic wavefields and the dynamic ocean, including the effects of temperature structure, salinity, pressure, internal waves, mesoscale variability, seabed composition, bathymetry, and ambient noise on acoustic performance. The major emphasis of these research activities is the development, evaluation, and application of advanced array-based sensing and signal processing techniques. The projects of interest encompass the design, modeling, calibration, and operational assessment of fixed, towed, bottom-mounted, distributed, and autonomous acoustic arrays used for passive and active sensing. Technical areas include beamforming, adaptive spatial filtering, matched-field processing, source localization, direction-of-arrival estimation, synthetic aperture techniques, coherent and incoherent processing, array performance optimization, and distributed sensor network architectures. Particular attention is given to improving target detection, classification, tracking, and localization in acoustically challenging shallow-water and deep-ocean environments while mitigating the effects of reverberation, multipath propagation, clutter, and environmental uncertainty. These projects require developing new analytical methods and numerical models, designing and executing laboratory and field experiments, integrating observational data with theoretical and computational approaches, and evaluating the operational effectiveness of emerging acoustic sensing technologies. Projects frequently involve the integration of acoustic observations with oceanographic measurements, autonomous platforms, and environmental prediction systems to improve the accuracy and reliability of sonar performance assessments under realistic operational conditions.

Requirements

Doctoral degree in Oceanography or related field and 20 years of experience.
A DoD Secret Clearance or higher.
US Citizenship.
A federal security clearance is required to hold this position.
The person hired into this position must be a U.S. citizen and successfully obtain and continue to maintain a Department of Defense (DOD) Personnel Security Clearance.

Nice To Haves

Prior experience and success as a Principal Investigator on federally funded research projects.
Established a history of successful fundraising, project execution, and publication.
Experience evaluating and interpreting in-situ observations.
Recognized as a national or international authority in ocean acoustics.
Applies extensive and advanced principles, theories, and concepts, and contributes to the development of solutions to complex problems that require innovation and ingenuity.
May create new science and/or technologies and extend them into new applications.

Responsibilities

Conceives and develops technical strategy and plans research to answer complex scientific questions, including the development of new technologies.
Develops collaborative and synergistic research relationships and coordinates research plans with peer scientists within APL, elsewhere at the UW, and at other institutions in the US and abroad.
Assesses the feasibility of proposed methods and tests.
Oversees research preparation and execution, including equipment procurement, fieldwork coordination, and on-site participation as chief scientist or as part of a collaborative science team.
Monitors quality and content in field data and makes real-time decisions on the adaptation of research activities in response to changing conditions and findings.
Conducts and/or manages data screening, calibration, analysis, and synthesis in the context of past results and scientific literature on theoretical, numerical, and experimental investigations to arrive at scientific conclusions.
Shares results with the scientific community and the naval research enterprise through meetings, conferences, reports, and articles in the peer-reviewed literature.
Pursues research funding opportunities through typical channels (e.g., ONR, NSF) and any additional emergent relationships with additional sponsors.
Writes and submits single- and multi-investigator proposals, including articulation of the scientific question and methods used to explore its answer, and development of a detailed, comprehensive research project plan and budget.
Cultivates and maintains a strong rapport with sponsors and collaborators, domestic and international scientific partners, and representatives from the operational Navy.
Supervises field engineers, junior engineers, and lab staff.
Serves as advisor and mentor to graduate students and postdocs.
Management of grant spending (purchases, salaries, overhead).
Prepares reports to sponsors throughout the project as well as at the close of each project.