Location: Gaithersburg, MD
Cap-Exempt H-1B Position — No lottery required
**PREP Research Associate** This position is part of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Professional Research Experience Program (PREP). NIST recognizes that its research staff may want to collaborate with researchers at academic institutions on specific projects of mutual interest and, therefore, requires those institutions to be recipients of a PREP award. The PREP program involves staff from a wide range of backgrounds conducting scientific research across various fields. Individuals in this position will perform technical work supporting the collaboration's scientific research. **Research Title:** Bioformulation Digital Twin Developer **The work will entail:** The work will support the NIST FRAME (Foundational Representation and Assimilation for Multimodal Experiments) program, which is developing a modeling and simulation ecosystem centered on a coherent material digital twin. The associate will develop and validate generative AI and physics-grounded modeling approaches that reconcile multimodal measurements, including SAXS, SANS, RSoXS, Cryo-EM, light scattering, and related observables. Initial demonstrations will focus on bioformulations and related soft nanocarrier platforms, with an emphasis on reproducible computational workflows, uncertainty quantification, and close collaboration with experimental and instrument teams. **U.S. Citizen Preferred** **Key responsibilities will include but are not limited to:** § Develop, train, and validate generative models for 3D structure and mesostructure of soft matter systems, with an initial emphasis on bioformulations and related nanocarrier platforms. § Design model architectures and training pipelines, including VAE and latent-variable models, diffusion and score-based models, autoregressive models, normalizing flows, or related approaches. § Create representations that bridge cartoon or parametric structure generators, material digital twin representations, and experimental signatures su