Postdoctoral Research Associate - Urban Energy Modeling, Grid-interactive Controls

Requisition Id 11754 

Overview: 

As a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science national laboratory, ORNL has an extraordinary 80-year history of solving the nation’s biggest problems. We have a dedicated and creative staff of over 6,000 people! Our vision for diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) is to cultivate an environment and practices that foster diversity in ideas and in the people across the organization, as well as to ensure ORNL is recognized as a workplace of choice. These elements are critical for enabling the execution of ORNL’s broader mission to accelerate scientific discoveries and their translation into energy, environment, and security solutions for the nation.

 

We are seeking a Postdoctoral Research Associate who will support the Electrification and Energy Infrastructure Division (EEID) and the Buildings and Transportation Science Division (BTSD) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).  

 

Nation-scale building energy modeling researchers create and simulate a model of every U.S. building. This involves urban-scale building energy modeling at the resolution of individual buildings and at the scale of nations to analyze building codes, energy efficiency, demand response, and climate change impacts toward a sustainable and resilient built environment. These activities involve multi-disciplinary collaboration across ORNL, collaborative partnerships and NDAs with over 50 well-known companies, and significant awards on world-class computational resources.

 

This team achieved world-first simulation of 125.7 million U.S. buildings, public release of 122.9 million building energy models (bit.ly/ModelAmerica) and has scaled EnergyPlus to over 1 million simulations per hour on supercomputers. In partnership with major organizations, the team is actively improving the data and algorithms of the Automatic Building Energy Modeling (AutoBEM, bit.ly/AutoBEM) software suite which involves big data processing, data analytics, machine learning, high-performance computing resources, computer vision, and building science to create, model, simulate, validate, and analyze building performance to create software prototypes (e.g. dashboards, bit.ly/virtual_epb) for actionable use of building data, models, or analysis by specific stakeholders. Over 50 million core-hours in 2023 were used to release an improved Model America v2.0 dataset covering 141.5 million buildings in the U.S. and Puerto Rico. Would you like to be part of the team that analyzes energy use of buildings across the country?

 

As a full-time Postdoctoral Research Associate your work will consist of assisting in the development and implementation of data organization and software development for scalable use and analysis of business-sensitive data. You will support Distinguished R&D staff in the invention or improvement of innovative algorithms for detection or estimation of building characteristics, validation against known data sources, scalable generation/simulation of buildings using OpenStudio and EnergyPlus, and/or use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to quantify and improve city-to-nation scales of individual building energy models. As part of R&D, you may be required to manage big data, create, and extend existing software capabilities, develop simple graphic user interfaces, and have the ability to work effectively with a team for effective integration of data, algorithms, and knowledge.

 

Major Duties/Responsibilities: 

• The development of innovative software techniques, knowledge of building energy modeling, frequent and consistent review of related literature, and collaboration with other team members for the development of technical capabilities, demonstrations, proposals, oral presentations, and publications.
• Proven RDD&D experience in building energy modeling, software development, Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence (ML/AI), or high-performance computing (HPC) resources
• Excellent programming skills, including Python
• Excellent building science or mechanical engineering skills
• Experience with OpenStudio measures and EnergyPlus
• Hands-on skills and experience developing impactful software applications
• Good communication skills for conveying technical material to both scientists and non-scientists in both written and oral presentations
• Self-disciplined work ethic and eagerness to tackle challenging research problems
• The ability to work effectively in a team environment
• Deliver ORNL’s mission by aligning behaviors, priorities, and interactions with our core values of Impact, Integrity, Teamwork, Safety, and Service. Promote diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility by fostering a