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Position Summary:
The Center of Public Policy, Partnerships, and Outreach (C3PO) at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute ( VTTI ) seeks qualified ambitious research engineers with aptitude for assisting customers in framing policy related research questions and developing data analysis tools and techniques to answer those questions.
The candidate should be an experienced professional capable of working independently and with interdisciplinary teams to improve transportation safety through cutting-edge research. As a Research Associate, this opening is pursuing applicants that demonstrate experience and skills in transportation safety, policy, and basic statistics.
Research projects range from small test-track experiments using a single next-generation vehicle to large naturalistic studies involving hundreds of vehicles on live roadways. The research often features data acquisition systems to unobtrusively collect various sensor elements with the aim of characterizing the roadway, vehicle, and driver performance. These measures are analyzed to address specific research questions that tend to focus on the characterization of existing transportation problems (e.g. crash causation) and/or the performance/development of advanced vehicle systems (e.g. crash avoidance technology).
This position is expected to focus predominantly on policy aspects of advanced transportation systems, automated driving systems, and safety standards.
Experience with vehicle systems and data analysis tools is preferred. The applicant must be comfortable and proficient in an environment where each project has some commonalities with previous but many new challenges to solve.
Duties and responsibilities:
- Develop program code for robust distillation of sensor and questionnaire data into informative summary data.
- Conduct routine data collection and analysis and determine the accuracy and completeness of the data collected.
- Coordinate research support activities including video reduction tasks and recruiting.
- Execute appropriate statistical analyses for different research applications.
-Oversee the daily operations of a project including schedule and budget maintenance.
- Write well documented, concise, and reliable code to perform various analysis tasks and subtasks of larger analyses.
- Generate graphical and tabular summaries of large quantities of analyzed data.
- Write proposals and statements-of-work
-Interface directly with sponsors to understand requirements and deliver technical presentations
-Travel to research sites (requirement fluctuates but will generally be -Research and compose literature reviews.
-Compose, review, and critique reports and research plans.
-Present research findings
Directions given and received:
Receive instructions on project objectives, feedback on proposed research plans, and project logistics from principal investigators, project managers and team members. Will supervise or coordinate the work of graduate research assistants, technicians, and others who assist in specific assignments.

Required Qualifications:
-Master's degree in fields of Human Factors, Experimental Psychology, Political Science, Public Administration, or Engineering (Mechanical, Industrial, Electrical or Computer). Candidates with a lesser degree and significant experience in lieu of master's degree will also be considered.
-Demonstrable experience in transportation or related field
-Demonstrated Project Management experience, qualified to lead project teams and oversee project schedule, budgets, and deliverables.
-Demonstrated writing and organizational skills.
-Solid understanding of engineering principles needed to analyze, verify, and interpret work.
-Background in data processing and analysis.
-Experience with proposal development.
-Familiarity with automated vehicle systems and associated research protocols
-Proficient in data collection, processing, and statistical analysis (e.g., SAS , R).

Preferred Qualifications:
-Preference will be given to broadly trained candidates who have grounding and skills in a variety of theoretical, analytical, critical, and methodological approaches to transportation policy and governance.
-Prior research experience in a transportation institute is strongly preferred as well as documented success in collaborative activity in transdisciplinary teams.



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