Part-Time Research Assistant

American University • Washington, DC

14h • $22

About The Position

American University is a student-centered research institution located in Washington, DC, with highly-ranked schools and colleges, internationally-renowned faculty, and a reputation for creating meaningful change in the world. The Research Assistant (RA) will work with Professor Alonzo to finalize a manuscript on phenological response to climate and land cover in a semi-arid environment. The RA will perform tasks such as processing high-resolution satellite data, statistical analysis of extracted phenological information, and summarization of results into written form. The RA will be responsible for finalizing a manuscript that can be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent.
• Less than 1 year of relevant experience.
• Must have experience building and analyzing phenological models using PlanetScope data in semi-arid climates.

Nice To Haves

• Bachelor's degree.

Responsibilities

• Analysis and Processing of Remote Sensing Data The RA will process satellite data to corrected surface reflectance using relative radiometric normalization. They will confirm date-to-date geolocation alignment and report out uncertainties from radiometry and image alignment. They will extract pixel values from all images using buffered, point shapefiles.
• Statistical Analysis The RA will gain expertise in the phenofit R package and produce phenological times series based on the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) at individual trees. With extracted phenometrics, they will build and test linear mixed models and XGBoost models to gain information about the relationships between climate cues, tree location in the urban environment, and the timing of phenological events.
• Literature Review The RA will build a body of literature in support of contextualizing their quantitative findings. This will involve literature search, construction of an annotated bibliography, and, finally, a literature review suitable for an article introduction and discussion section.
• Manuscript Preparation The RA will synthesize and collate quantitative and supporting information from the previous tasks into a manuscript suitable for submission in an appropriate peer-reviewed journal.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Part-time
• Career Level: Entry Level