Postdoctoral Research Associate

Requisition Id 15076 

 

­­Overview:  

 As a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science national laboratory, ORNL has an impressive 80-year legacy of addressing the nation’s most pressing challenges. Our team is made up of over 7,000 dedicated and innovative individuals! Our goal is to create an environment where a variety of perspectives and backgrounds are valued, ensuring ORNL is known as a top choice for employment. These principles are essential for supporting our broader mission to drive scientific breakthroughs and translate them into solutions for energy, environmental, and security challenges facing the nation.

 

We are seeking a highly motivated Postdoctoral Research Associate who will support resilience of critical infrastructure system projects at ORNL. This position resides in the Critical Infrastructure Resilience (CIR) Group in the Human Dynamics Section, Geospatial Science and Human Security Division, National Security Sciences Directorate, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).    

 

As a Postdoctoral Research Associate, you will contribute to cutting-edge research and development efforts aimed at enhancing the resilience of critical infrastructure systems against various threats and disruptions. This position offers a unique opportunity to work on interdisciplinary projects in collaboration with leading experts, tackling challenges related to energy, water, cybersecurity, transportation, and more, with a special emphasis on grid resilience assessments and equity analysis. You will have the opportunity to creatively use interdisciplinary methods from computational data science, machine learning, geographical information sciences, and many other topics to help frame and solve the above problems on a national and global scale.   

 

The successful candidate will contribute to cutting-edge research and development efforts aimed at enhancing the resilience of critical infrastructure systems against various threats and disruptions. You will work on advancing analytic methods and tools to improve understanding of critical infrastructure resilience, specifically improving access to electrical power for climate resilience and grid security. Your research will help to inform investments in grid resilience and restoration, deliver immediate benefits to our existing emergency response systems, and provide visibility into disparities in access to energy.  

 

The National Security Sciences Directorate (NSSD) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory leads scientific and technological breakthroughs to confront some of the nation’s most difficult security challenges. We develop interdisciplinary applications needed for the security of our nation today and target our vision on how these challenges may manifest themselves in a decade or more. NSSD’s research and development focuses on cybersecurity and cyber physical resiliency, data analytics, geospatial science and technology, nuclear nonproliferation, and high-performance computing for sensitive national security missions. We also enhance ORNL contributions to national security challenges by working closely with leading researchers at the lab in areas such as nuclear and chemical sciences and engineering, applied materials, advanced manufacturing, biosecurity, transportation, and computing. 

 

The CIR Group is a part of the Geospatial Science and Human Security Division at ORNL. The CIR group is heavily engaged in modeling risk and resilience of critical infrastructures to achieve equitable, reliable and adaptable built environments through data ecosystems creation, data science and integrated complex systems analysis. The group’s vision is to enable a sustainable, safe, and secure critical infrastructure for all. 

 

Major Duties/Responsibilities: 

• Conduct research on grid resilience assessment methodologies, including modeling and simulation of grid operations under stress conditions, identification of vulnerabilities, and development of resilience enhancement strategies. 
• Contribute to the design, development, and implementation of new models, methods, and algorithms that improve our understanding of critical infrastructure resilience, specifically improving access to electrical power for climate resilience and grid security purposes.
• Investigate the intersection of critical infrastructure resilience and equity, analyzing the differential impacts of infrastructure disruptions on vulnerable communities. Devel