Posted: 13-Jun-25
Location: Minneapolis, Minnesota
Internal Number: 368736
Hours: 14 hours/week (part-time, temporary/casual appointment)
Hourly Rate: $53.00 - $57.00 ($110,240 - $118,560)
Department: Department of Economics, University of Minnesota â“ NatCap TEEMs
Supervisor: Colleen Miller
Location: Remote
Start Date: estimating 6/24/2025
End Date: 8/31/2025
About the Project
The Pest Control Living Database Project, funded by USDA Grant #1023888, aims to revolutionize pest management science by combining insect observation datasets, biological traits, and remote sensing data into an integrated analytical platform. This Living Database will provide researchers and practitioners with a tool to identify, understand, and manage pest dynamics across diverse agricultural landscapes using state-of-the-art data science and automation techniques.
The interdisciplinary team includes ecologists, economists, entomologists, and computer scientists from multiple institutions. This hire will directly support development of key software tools within this framework.
Position Summary
The NatCap TEEMs group in the Department of Economics at the University of Minnesota seeks a motivated, experienced software programmer to contribute to the development of:
- A natural language processing (NLP) tool for extracting and structuring insect trait data from scientific literature.
- The core Living Database infrastructure, enabling integration and querying of ecological datasets at scale.
- Scientific manuscripts describing these methods for peer-reviewed publication.
This is a temporary, part-time, hourly position for a skilled contractor with flexible availability and a collaborative mindset. The candidate will work closely with the scientific leads and technical team.
Primary Responsibilities
Tool Development (50%)
- Design, develop, and document a robust NLP tool to identify and extract traits from ecological and entomological literature.
- Collaborate on the back-end development of the Living Database infrastructure (e.g., ingestion, storage, access, API).
- Write clean, modular, well-tested Python code for database automation and processing pipelines.
Research Support & Collaboration (30%)
- Contribute to reproducible computational workflows supporting scientific analyses.
- Work with interdisciplinary team members to refine software functionality based on user needs.
- Assist with methodological documentation and figures for inclusion in academic publications.
Writing & Documentation (20%)
- Contribute to the methodology sections of two academic publications.
- Write internal technical documentation and external-facing guidance for collaborators and users.
Required
- BA/BS plus at least six years of experience or master's degree plus at least four years of experience.
- Proven experience in Python programming, especially for scientific computing or NLP applications.
- Experience working with or developing database systems and/or API integrations.
- Familiarity with common NLP libraries (e.g., spaCy, NLTK, transformers).
- Strong documentation, communication, and collaborative development skills (e.g., Git, GitHub).
- Demonstrated ability to work independently and remotely.
Preferred
- Experience working on interdisciplinary scientific research projects including ecological, economic and remote sensing-specific research.
- Knowledge of ecological or entomological data and/or trait databases.
- Experience writing or contributing to peer-reviewed scientific publications.
- Comfort with Google Earth Engine, geospatial data formats, or Earth observation integration.
- Ph.D. in Computer Science.