Assistant Research Scientist; PREP

Overview

General Description
This position is part of the National Institute of Standards (NIST) Professional Research Experience (PREP) program. NIST recognizes that its research staff may wish to collaborate with researchers at academic institutions on specific projects of mutual interest, thus requires that such institutions must be the recipient of a PREP award.
The PREP program requires staff from a wide range of backgrounds to work on scientific research in many areas. Employees in this position will perform technical work that underpins the scientific research of the collaboration.

Benchmarking Privacy-Enhancing Technologies

This project focuses on benchmarking privacy‑enhancing technologies (PETs) to assess their effectiveness in protecting sensitive information. The candidate will work as part of a team to conduct experiments and write research reports that focus on work from the NIST PETs Testbed, including the Collaborative Research Cycle, which benchmarks synthetic data generators, and the Privacy Red Teaming Exercise for Genomic Federated Learning.

The student will have the opportunity to explore various research topics, such as conducting or analyzing privacy attacks, investigating the statistical properties of input and output data, and implementing and tuning PETs. Projects will be matched with the student’s interests and background.

• Conduct original research under the guidance of senior scientists
• Collaborate with team members to design and execute experiments
• Analyze results and contribute to the writing of research reports
• Implement and tune PETs to assess their effectiveness

Position is Remote

• Seeking a graduate degree
• Strong sense of curiosity
• Strong analytical and problem‑solving skills
• Experience with Python programming preferred
• Interest in privacy and data protection preferred
• Familiarity with scientific reading and technical writing

• CV/Resume (maximum 3 pages, include only a valid email address; do not include self‑portraits, phone number, home address, or languages spoken)

The Johns Hopkins University is committed to equal opportunity for its faculty, staff, and students. The university does not discriminate on the basis of sex, gender, marital status, pregnancy, race, color, ethnicity, national origin, age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran status or other legally protected characteristic. The university is committed to providing qualified individuals access to all academic and employment programs, benefits and activities on the basis of demonstrated ability, performance and merit without regard to personal factors that are irrelevant to the program involved.