Careers

Description:

 A fellowship opportunity is available with the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service (FS) within the Pacific Northwest Research Station (PNWRS) located in Seattle, Washington. Remote participation is preferred if the applicant is not local (Seattle Area).

This is an opportunity to participate in wildfire and smoke emissions research conducted by the Pacific Wildland Fire Sciences Laboratory, a collaboration between the University of Washington’s School of Environmental and Forest Sciences (SEFS) and the US Forest Services Pacific Northwest Research Station’s AirFire Program. The participant will interact with a multidisciplinary team of university faculty, research staff, graduate students, and scientists with expertise on fire weather, climatology, air quality, statistics, and computer engineering. Land managers, air quality and health agencies, and the public use our research products, tools, information and expertise to address issues concerning smoke, prescribed and wildland fire and air quality.

This is an exceptional opportunity for the participant to advance in a variety of programming skills while developing websites and User Interfaces (UI) that will be used to support wildfire incident command teams. It will also provide occasions to engage with a wide user community involved in wildland fire and smoke.

Learning Objectives: The participant will have the opportunity to practice and improve skills in:

• Developing and maintaining modern, performant websites that host an assortment of data.
• Creating User Interfaces based on mockups.
• Processing and incorporating data from a variety of sources and formats.
• Creating and debugging backend software processes.
• Python, Javascript, HTML, CSS, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and other technologies.
• Using data processing systems and operational sites.
• Data management, including collecting, cleaning, organizing, and maintaining datasets.

Mentor: The mentor for this opportunity is Sim Larkin (sim.larkin@usda.gov). If you have questions about the nature of the research, please contact the mentor.

Skills/Eligibility:

The qualified candidate should have received a bachelor’s, master’s, or doctoral degree in one of the relevant fields. Degree must have been received within the past five years.

Preferred skills:

• Have facility with git and basic Unix commands.
• Modern JS/HTML/CSS.
• Python coding, including object-oriented programming and object-oriented design.
• A modern JS framework (ExpressJS, Svelte, React, etc.)
• At least one server-side language (ideally Python, or a willingness to learn python.)

Other helpful skills:

• Knowledge of graphics and charting libraries (D3, Highcharts, Chart.js, etc.)
• Experience with Docker and either AWS/GCC
• Communication and interpersonal skills
• Demonstrated ability to perform collaboratively in a team environment
• Experience with Unix and Windows OS
• Use of videoconference software