Data Scientist

The Rice University Department of Computer Science and Department of Materials Science and NanoEngineering are seeking a Data Scientist to build and operate the data infrastructure for READINESS, a new $20 million NSF-funded project transforming four materials synthesis systems (CVD, thermal, PVD, and plasma CVD reactors for 2D materials, oxides, and diamond films) into an AI-driven, remotely accessible autonomous laboratory. The position combines data engineering and analysis, including deploying an S3-compatible object store, developing ingestion connectors for live instruments and robot controllers, and establishing SQL and vector-search capabilities under Rice single sign-on. The role will also compute embeddings over images and spectra, develop retrieval and similarity-search services, and build AI agents capable of answering researchers' questions directly from the data.