Postdoctoral Research Associate, Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Arizona · Tucson, AZ · 3 mo ago
Information TechnologyFull-time
Duties & Responsibilities
- Lead, design, build and test cycles for robotic platforms and experimental rigs
- Develop real-time control (e.g., model-based, optimal, learning-augmented control), perception, and planning modules
- Run structured experiments and benchmarking
- Architect high-quality research codebases in C++/Python/C# (e.g., ROS/ROS 2, RT frameworks, Unity/Unreal integration as needed)
- Implement data pipelines, simulation, and CI/testing
- Maintain reproducible artifacts and documentation
- Mentor undergraduate and graduate students
- Develop short course modules and/or run workshops in Robotics/AI/Control
- Contribute to proposal development and grant writing (including preliminary data, methods, budgets text)
- Prepare progress reports, and coordinate with internal/external collaborators
- Interface with sponsors where applicable
- Foster collaborations within the Department, with other units across the University, and with team members at other institutes
- Participate and contribute to meetings with industry, academia and sponsors
Requirements
- PhD in Robotics, Electrical & Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Computer Science, or closely related field
- Must have PhD conferred upon hire
Preferred Qualifications
- Hands-on experience integrating hardware + software for robots (arms, mobile, mechatronics) and real-time control
- Experience in computer vision, multimodal perception, or foundation models (VLMs/LLMs) applied to robotics
- Track record of patent contributions and/or technology transfer
- Experience preparing grants (NSF/NIH/DoD/industry) and coordinating collaborative deliverables
- Prior experience mentoring/teaching, curriculum or workshop development
- Experience with safety standards for robotics labs and human–robot interaction studies
- Experience with CUDA/accelerators; optimization; SLAM; tactile/force control; AR/XR interfaces; Unity/C# for robotics visualization; DevOps/containers
- Experience with AI/ML: Deep learning for vision/perception; VLMs and LLM tooling; dataset curation; evaluation/benchmarks; basic MLOps