Job Description:
San Diego State University Research Foundation


Research Scientist I

US-CA-San Diego

Job ID: 2024-16980
Type: Full-Time Contract
# of Openings: 1
Category: Research/Project
College of Arts & Letters

Overview

This position is budgeted for $6,250.00 per month and is non-negotiable.

The Center for Open Geographical Sciences is a hub for open and reproducible spatial data science. COGS integrates spatial analysis into the social and natural sciences. The Vegetation and Landscape Ecology (VALE) Lab within COGS examines patterns and dynamics of terrestrial ecosystems at the landscape scale. We study the impacts of human-caused landscape change on terrestrial plant communities. The tools we use include field measurements of e.g., plant community composition, multivariate analysis, spatial statistics, landscape simulation models, and geospatial data analysis (GIS and Remote Sensing). COGS is within the Department of Geography. The educational mission of the Department of Geography is to provide students with the knowledge, critical thinking skills, and techniques required to understand the complex and global interdependencies between people, places, and environments.

Responsibilities

Under supervision of an SDSU faculty member, the position is intended to provide mentored advanced training to enhance professional skills and research independence in the Postdoctoral Research Scholar’s academic discipline. The Postdoctoral Research Scholar is responsible for but not limited to: Producing scientific and scholarly products (data, publications, software) related to species distribution modeling in support of basic and applied biogeography research and climate-smart ecosystem management.

Core Responsibilities

The Research Scientist will support the research mission of the unit (Center for Open Geospatial Sciences) by contributing to research project design and implementation, new research proposal development, and training and outreach.

• Execution of research (data collection, management, cleaning, preprocessing, modeling, analysis)
• Disseminating research results and products (preparing scientific papers, curating and archiving datasets
• Developing open source software
• Presenting at professional meetings, presentations to students and the public, trainings and workshops).

Work takes place primarily in computational laboratory setting, with some limited field work and travel to meet with research collaborators.

Position Specific Responsibilities

The Research Scientist will carry out biogeographical research using species distribution modeling and related methods to address questions of global change impacts on terrestrial ecosystems; and will develop open source tools for this area of research.

Qualifications

Knowledge & Abilities

• Environmental Science
• Geography
• Spatial Data Science
• Geographic Information Science
• Biogeography
• Plant Ecology

Project Specific Knowledge and Abilities

• Very level of experience using R (platform for statistical computing) to develop scripts and packages for spatial and statistical analysis of environmental data
• Demonstrated knowledge of species distribution modeling methods, theory, and workflow, and experience implementing species distribution models
• Experience developing open-source software in support of biogeography
• Experience teaching environmental data analysis and statistics using open source software
• Excellent publishing record in highly-ranked scientific journals

Education & Experience

• Ph.D. in Geography, Ecology, Botany, Environmental Science, Forestry or related field and a minimum of two (2) years of postdoctoral research.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience using ArcGIS for spatial environmental data analysis
• Experience extracting and cleaning biodiversity data from global databases
• Experience analyzing remotely sensed data and other spatial environmental data

Additional Applicant Information

• Candidate must reside in California or live in a commutable distance from SDSU at time of hire.
• Job offer is contingent upon satisfactory clearance based on Background Check results (including a criminal record check).
• San Diego State University Research Foundation is an EEO/AA/Disability/Vets/Title IX Employer.

PI239903066

Salary: $5,546.00

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