Assistant Research Professor – Distributed Acoustic Sensing and Machine Learning

About the role

The Department of Geosciences at Penn State seeks a Research Assistant Professor to support a project developing machine-learning methods for seismic source characterization using distributed acoustic sensing (DAS).

Responsibilities

• Conduct physics-based wavefield simulations.
• Generate synthetic DAS datasets.
• Develop deep-learning models for seismic event detection, location, and full moment-tensor estimation.
• Validate these methods using field observations from earthquakes and controlled-source experiments.
• Contribute to publications.
• Contribute to project reports.
• Student mentoring.
• Collaborate with university and national-laboratory partners.

Requirements

• Hold a Ph.D. in geophysics, seismology, applied mathematics, computer science, or a related field by the date of hire.
• Experience in DAS, seismic modeling, moment-tensor inversion, machine learning, scientific programming, and high-performance computing is highly desirable.

Benefits

• Competitive benefits package for full-time employees supporting personal and professional wellbeing.
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• Robust retirement plans.
• Generous 75% tuition discount for employees and eligible spouses and children.

For more detailed information, please visit our Benefits Page. (Note: For Postdoctoral benefits, please see our Postdoctoral Benefits page.)