"Research Associate"

About us

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology is the world's leading resource for conservation, research, education, and citizen science focused on birds. The Lab is a unit within Cornell's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, where full-time faculty and other renowned professionals direct twelve world-class, mission-driven programs. The Center for Avian Population Studies (CAPS) is one of the major programmatic units at the Lab, collecting and disseminating biodiversity data to enhance the information and decision-making tools available to conservationists and scientific researchers. We achieve this by producing scientific, computational, and big data resources that transform how we understand and protect the world around us.

The Cornell Lab is home to a vibrant community of several research associates working across all twelve programs. We strive to provide a supportive and collaborative environment for this community that fosters personal growth and career advancement. The Lab is an inclusive community, and we recognize that diverse, inclusive communities create more innovative and impactful work to address global challenges and benefit humanity and nature. The Cornell Lab is committed to fostering and sustaining a healthy workplace that values diverse and inclusive perspectives and backgrounds and supports growth and advancement opportunities. The Lab believes that every team member enriches our diversity by exposing us to a broad range of ways to understand and engage with the world, identify challenges, and discover, design, and deliver solutions.

Position Function

The goal of the eBird Status and Trends (S&T) project is to use the information collected by the global participatory science project, eBird, to become the go-to source for publicly available high-quality, high-resolution visualizations, data products, and tools for describing where bird populations occur and how they change through time. To translate eBird observations into robust data products we create custom modeling workflows designed to fill spatiotemporal gaps based on remote sensing data while controlling for the biases inherent in species observations collected by volunteers. The workflows generate estimates of species' distributions and abundance, measure how they change over time, and identify the features of the environment associated with populations. Leveraging the broad coverage and fine scale of eBird, these estimates are generated with high resolution across global extents making it possible to address a wide variety of important ecological and conservation applications.

We are seeking a visionary Statistical Scientist to join the Status and Trends (S&T) research team at the Center for Avian Population Studies (CAPS). The desired candidate is a forward-thinking individual excited to identify and address the technical challenges necessary to develop novel ecological information, data products, and tools. The focus of this position is developing methods to disentangle dynamic, multiscale ecological signals from large, noisy observational data. This work lies at the interface of statistics, machine learning/AI, ecology, and conservation and spans a range of activities from exploratory analysis, visualization, and discovery to prediction, validation, quantification of uncertainty, and inference.

To thrive in this role, the ideal candidate will combine a rigorous foundation in statistical modeling with an understanding of ecological processes, biodiversity data, and the inherent uncertainty within these systems. The Statistical Scientist will join a highly collaborative, interdisciplinary research team to accelerate and extend ongoing research efforts (including DL-based joint species distribution modeling and causal machine learning) and contribute to the development of innovative solutions to address novel global ecological and conservation challenges. This position will also collaborate closely with the CAPS Conservation Science Program to translate research into actionable solutions, enabling evidence-based conservation decision-making.

We are interested in candidates that span a range of experience levels, from entry-level to senior scientists.

Anticipated Division of Time

Research and Program Development (40%)

• Develop an independent research program aligned with the vision and strategic goals of the S&T program and CAPS.
• Advance existing S&T analyses, production workflows, and data products for transforming global participatory science observations into high-resolution estimates of species distributions, abundance trends, and population drivers.
• Work towards/take a leading role on the S&T research team identifying, developing, and adapting emerging approaches for priority applications.
• Publish findings in top peer-reviewed journals and conferences and engage with the broader statistical and ecological research communities.
• Identify, seek, and contribute to securing funding to support the broader strategic goals of S&T and CAPS.

Research Applications (30%)

• Partner with the Conservation Science program to advance science to action applications, improving and scaling S&T methodologies for actionable biodiversity conservation planning and decision-making.
• Collaborate with the production/data engineering team to develop, scale, and deploy analyses for broad use and applications.

Mentoring and capacity building (25%)

• Provide leadership and foster the development of a cohesive interdisciplinary data science team within the Center, aligning team goals with the Lab's strategic vision.
• Supervise postdoctoral fellows, and depending upon experience, supervise researchers.
• Mentor undergraduate and graduate students contributing to Center projects.
• Actively participate in lab activities, including team meetings, seminars, and project discussions.

Contributing to activities at Cornell and the Lab of Ornithology (5%)

• Contribute to projects at other Centers within the Lab and participate in interdisciplinary collaborations.
• Engage with campus activities, including seminars, talks, and project meetings.
• Collaborate with the Advancement & Development (Philanthropic-focused) and Communication programs at the Lab as needed.

Term of position

This is a three-year appointment renewable conditional on satisfactory performance and funding.

Requirements

• Ph.D. in statistics, quantitative ecology, or a related field with strong background in statistics and model development.
• Ability to develop, adapt, and apply quantitative methods to answer ecological questions or hypotheses.
• A strong record of conducting independent research and scholarly activities, including publication in peer-reviewed journals and presenting at scientific conferences.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to translate complex methodologies into actionable insights for technical and non-technical audiences.
• Proficiency in R for working with the project codebase.

Desired qualifications

• Expertise with spatial, temporal, or spatiotemporal modeling, causal inference, AI/ML/DL, causal ML, explainable ML, AI/ML/DL, and other relevant analytical skills.
• Experience designing, implementing, testing, and validating statistical learning models for analyzing large and complex environmental or spatiotemporal datasets.
• Experience addressing modeling challenges that commonly arise analyzing ecological &/or observational data such as bias correction, uncertainty quantification, and data integration across a range of inferential objectives, from prediction to statistical testing.
• Proven ability to conduct collaborative research with interdisciplinary teams, from conception to completion.
• Ability to manage multiple projects and priorities in a collaborative, fast-paced research environment.
• Leadership and mentoring experience with junior research scientists, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate and undergraduate students.
• Experience in ornithology is a bonus but not required.

Supervision Exercised:

The Statistical Scientist will be supervised by Dr. Daniel Fink, Statistician and Senior Research Associate in the Center for Avian Population Studies.

Formal supervision of postdoctoral associates/fellows within the Cornell Lab. Training of staff, undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, and visiting scholars.

Salary, rewards, and benefits:

Salary is commensurate with experience, and includes benefits. Annual salaries are subject to the Cornell University annual salary improvement program. Relocation funds are available.

Benefits provided by Cornell include a broad range of comprehensive health care options, generous paid leave provisions: 3 weeks of vacation, 13 holidays (including end of year winter break), paid family leave, and superior retirement contributions. Additionally, Cornell provides access to professional development initiatives, wellness programs, and employee discounts with local and national retail brands.