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Position Summary:
The Center for Advanced Automotive Research ( CAAR ) at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute ( VTTI ) seeks qualified ambitious researchers with aptitude for investigating and solving complex challenges.
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, human factors, programming, and statistics with an aptitude for developing and executing robust experimental designs.
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 focuses predominantly on maximizing the safety associated with Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, automated vehicles, and Connected vehicles. Applicant should be comfortable working in a hands-on environment with the latest technologies and also exhibit excellent communication skills.
VTTI is a fast-paced working environment with new challenges each day.
Duties and responsibilities:
- Organize customer needs into feasible open-road experiments, test track experiments, or analysis of large scale naturalistic driving databases as is appropriate.
- Oversee instrumentation of vehicles to support research needs
- Develop analysis code to process vehicle measures (e.g., accelerations, yaw, range to other vehicles) and describe events and alternative outcomes.
- 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 from experienced researchers on project objectives, feedback on proposed research plans, and project logistics from principal investigators, project managers and team members. Position requires supervising or coordinating 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, or Engineering (Mechanical, Industrial, Biomedical, Electrical or Computer). Candidates with a lesser degree and significant experience in lieu of master's degree will also be considered.
-The applicant must be comfortable and proficient in an environment where projects have some commonalities with previous projects, but each offering many new challenges to solve.-Demonstrable experience in transportation or related field requiring comparable skillsets
-Demonstrated Project Management experience, qualified to lead project teams and oversee project schedule, budgets, and deliverables.

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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