Research support for satellite hydrology and machine learning
We are global satellite hydrologists: we use many terabytes of satellite data to first observe and then model the quantity and quality of the ater every river on earth. We also work with low level computer vision for signal extraction from satellite data, but this is always in service of using that signal to understand freshwater. Our current projects center around trying to estimate how much water humans are removing from global rivers.
Our lab hosts 1-2 undergrads per year, and we always need help with our research: running tests, gathering and QA/QC'ing data, developing and testing predictive ML models, feature engineering, signal extraction, and results analysis. Students in their first semester typically 'work for' a graduate student in the lab and are given specific tasks, and, should those tasks result in useful analysis, co authorship on published papers. Students returning for more than one semester are able to do their own research, and we've had more than one undergrad publish their research in journals. A high number of undergrads in the lab go on to grad school, and indeed this experience is designed as a research traineeship and grad school 'practice'- you learn and experience the responsibilities, scope, pacing, expectation, skills, and standards of communication for how to be a grad student, and we get the help we need with our work.
Our work is highly specialized, and thus we do require quite a few skills.
This work is for credit, and we will scale the credits to the nature of the work you want to do and how long it will take. Heavy work will get 4 credits.
In the lab, you'll be able to try on living and working as a grad student. You will become a full member of the lab and learn how to set your own goals, deadlines, and deliverables, and when you are done you will 1) know for sure what grad school is like 2) have contributed to meaningful work, and maybe 3) become a co author or even first author of a peer reviewed publication.