• Post-Doc Research Associate

    University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill, NC)


    Vacancy ID: PDS004558

    Position Summary/Description:

    The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill invites applications for a Postdoctoral Research Associate position in astronomical data pipeline development supporting the upcoming Argus Array, with a focus on photometry and light curve detrending in support of a variety of science cases, including exoplanet discovery and characterization, stellar variability and astroseismology, and microlensing searches in the galactic plane and beyond. Argus is a massively multiplexed array of 900 small-aperture telescopes, able to cover a combined 8,000 square degrees of sky with 55 gigapixels of low-noise CMOS detectors. This enormous field of view allows the Array to achieve cadences as fast as one second across the entire sky, while also conducting a deep survey by combining 6-10 hours of observations each night. Over a five-year survey, Argus will collect 1014 photometric measurements of 107 stars.

     

    This role will work as part of a collaborative and multidisciplinary team to develop software for data analysis, monitoring, and science verification of the Array, with a focus on precision light curve generation and detrending pipelines. Depending on the science interests and background of the applicant, these projects could include novel techniques and approaches to difference image analysis, survey-scale photometric calibration and detrending, periodicity searches, and/or other areas.

     

    A negotiable fraction of this role is reserved for independent research, and extensive opportunities for collaboration-building within the Argus Science Team and department, as well as access to departmental observing facilities. UNC Chapel Hill is the founding member of the SOAR project and has 61 nights guaranteed annually on the highly subscribed telescope atop Cerro Pachon, Chile. SOAR is equipped with high-speed queue-based spectroscopic capabilities and resides within 2 km of the Rubin Observatory. UNC is also the lead institution for the Argus Array, the SkyNet rapid-response array located on four continents, and the Evryscope all-sky survey; our labs built SOAR’s Goodman high-throughput spectrograph. Our department has graduate students, postdocs and faculty working in time-domain

     

    astronomy; general observational astronomy; exoplanets and stars; experimental astrophysics; computational astrophysics and gravity; high-energy and cosmology theory; and neutrino and nuclear astrophysics. UNC Chapel Hill has significant high-performance computing resources, including the 17,000-core Longleaf cluster optimized for I/O intensive workloads with dedicated GPU and large-memory partitions. The Research Triangle area is a dynamic collaborative environment with UNC -Chapel Hill, Duke University, and North Carolina State University all located within close proximity.

    Education and Experience:

    Experience with implementation of photometric and time-series detrending algorithms and high-performance computing

     

    Experience with large software projects, including proficiency across the software development lifecycle (version control, documentation, and testing)

     

    Research experience with astronomical data analysis and large-scale astronomical survey datasets