[JOB] [UMass Boston] Research Fellow in Data Management for the Stone Living Lab

[Jarrett Byrnes]

https://employmentopportunities.umb.edu/boston/en-us/job/523287/research-fellow
Applications close May 21st 2024

The Stone Living Lab (https://stonelivinglab.org/), a multi-institution partnership researching coastal defense in the face of sea level rise, seeks a data manager to work with its scientists at UMass Boston. As the Stone Living Lab (SLL) pursues its scientific mission, the principal investigators (PIs) and students involved are generating a wealth of data in a wide variety of formats. In order to maximize the use of our data across multiple lab groups, we are seeking a research fellow and data manager to help us curate, manage, and make publicly accessible our data in a way that obeys FAIR (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse) best practices. We are seeking someone who will work with the PIs and associated researchers with the creation, organization, and maintenance of the SLL data management process as well as generation of public-facing products using this data. 

The Research Fellow would be responsible for creating the entirety of our data archive and public availability cyberinfrastructure. We hope to host our data on either the Environmental Data Repository (https://edirepository.org/) or Data One (https://www.dataone.org/services/), to provide long-term public availability, robust metadata generation, and open APIs. 

Once created, they’d be tasked with front-end development for public-facing applications for scientists, public education, and policy makers. They would be responsible for training and supervising students in data curation and data presentation to multiple audiences. Where possible, they will also work to create public workshops on data use for the lab’s different stakeholder groups based on principles and lessons from Data Carpentries or other similar organizations. 

UMass Boston is one of the most diverse campuses in the Northeast region of the U.S. and has a well-established commitment to social justice, equity, and inclusion, with an anti-racist and health-promoting mission. The university, and the Stone Living Lab, strongly encourage applications from persons with diverse backgrounds and provide equal employment opportunities without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, age, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, disability, military status, or genetic information.

Examples of Duties: 

Data Management: 

○ Determine the optimal data hosting and delivery solutions that follow best practices for the international data community. 

○ Develop a lab-wide data management plan for standard use by anyone working with Stone Living Lab resources. 

○ Work with scientists on data quality control and help them to prepare metadata for each data product they produce. 

○ Work with scientists to archive data and/or create archiving protocols and pipelines for future use. 

○ Work to create pipelines between SLL data and the Ocean Biogeographic Information Service (OBIS) and the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS) for international representation of SLL data. 

● Lab Data Coordination 

○ Develop plans, timelines, and milestones for lab data deposition and use. 

○ Collaborate with project scientists to ensure timely adherence to data management policies and protocols of the Stone Living Lab. 

● Build Data Pipelines for Immediate Use: 

○ Work with real-time data streams to establish data pipelines that quality control the data before providing them to the public. 

○ Create targeted products to provide lab administration, policy-makers, and stakeholders notices of data on extreme events from data streams. 

● Student Supervision: 

○ Train and supervise SLL students and scientists in best practices for future data archiving, so that all work done at SLL into the future is in accordance with FAIR principles. 

○ Supervise student adherence to SLL data management protocols. 

○ Conduct workshops for students in git, interaction with data portals, and how to use multiple streams of SLL data for their own work. 

● Public Facing Frontend Development: 

○ Create a searchable and publicly accessible data portal of all SLL data products. 

○ Create publicly visible dashboards and interactive web apps to visualize SLL data streams. 

○ Create targeted products as needed by SLL staff for communication with lab stakeholders. 

● Stakeholder and Public Outreach: 

○ Work with scientists and the outreach and engagement team to develop web applications and data products for public use. 

○ Develop workshops in data use and reuse for stakeholder audiences. 



Qualifications: 

Masters degree or above required. Preferred degree in computer science, data science, environmental data science, or IT with a focus on data management. Degrees in ecology, evolution, environmental science, oceanography, etc. are also preferred if the candidate has demonstrated professional experience in data management. 

● Minimum 2 years in data science and management. 

● Relevant coursework and/or experience in data management preferred. 

● Familiarity with Ecological Meta-Language (EML). 

● Experience with Excel, SQL, R. 

● Experience with R Shiny is a plus. 

● Knowledge of web content management systems interfacing with relational database systems using common programming languages. 

● Strong communication and organizational skills. 

● Ability to work independently. 

● Experience with data management in a single lab or multi-lab environment. 

● Familiarity with major data hosting platforms for Ecological or other environmental data streams (e.g., Data One, OBIS, EDI, or others). 


Salary and Benefits

All official salary offers must be approved by Human Resources. We are grant funded for ~$80,000 for one year with benefits. Potential extensions are contingent on future grant funding.

For more and to apply, see https://employmentopportunities.umb.edu/boston/en-us/job/523287/research-fellow

-Jarrett Byrnes

-------------

Jarrett Byrnes

Associate Professor

Dept. of Biology

UMass Boston

ISC-3-3130

401-529-4104

pronouns: he, him, his

http://byrneslab.net

@jebyrnes