Postdoctoral Scholar

About the role

The Professor M. Emin Kutay’s research group in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Geospatial Engineering at Michigan Technological University is seeking a motivated postdoctoral research associate to advance the analysis, quality assurance, and calibration of automated pavement condition data and pavement performance modeling.

Responsibilities

• Performing research across two sponsored projects, including:
  • Developing and applying statistically based calibration, audit, and validation procedures for automated pavement distress data collection systems;
  • Evaluating and recalibrating pavement distress definitions, severity thresholds, distress weight factors, and composite pavement condition indices;
  • Assessing pavement deterioration models and network-level condition projection methods;
  • Developing and maintaining data analysis tools and processing pipelines in Python;
  • Helping with proposal preparation;
  • Preparing manuscripts for publication in peer-reviewed journals;
  • Supervising and collaborating with graduate and undergraduate students.

Requirements

• Required Education, Certifications, Licensures: Ph.D. in Civil Engineering. The degree must have been earned within 72 months prior to the beginning of the appointment.
• Required Experience: Six (6) years of research experience in at least three (3) of the following research areas: civil engineering, pavement engineering, pavement distress data collection and analysis, pavement management systems, statistical data analysis, and mechanistic-empirical pavement modeling. Experience in publishing research findings in top peer-reviewed journals.

Desired Education and/or Experience

• Strong background in mechanistic-empirical pavement design and asphalt viscoelasticity is desired.
• Experience with automated pavement distress data, pavement condition indices, or pavement management software is also desirable.

Knowledge, Skills, And/or Abilities

• Demonstrated ability to communicate effectively across cultural boundaries and work harmoniously with diverse groups of students, faculty, and staff.
• Strong programming skills in Python.

Desirable Knowledge, Skills, And/or Abilities

• Knowledge of pavement engineering, mechanistic-empirical pavement design, asphalt viscoelasticity, pavement distress and condition data, statistical analysis methods, and pavement management systems.
• Familiarity with the JAVA programming language is desirable; strong mathematical, statistical, and analytical reasoning skills.

Work Environment and/or Physical Demands

The work environment is that of a typical lab or office setting. The noise level in the work environment is usually low to moderate.