Location: Gaithersburg, MD
Cap-Exempt H-1B Position — No lottery required
**PREP Research Associate** **CHIPS Funded Project.** 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 and thus requires that such institutions be the recipients 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. **Research Title:** Physicist (CHIPS Project: Accurate Cure Kinetics, Stress, Mechanical Properties and Warpage Measurements for Next-Generation Microelectronics Packaging under Device Relevant Conditions) **U.S. Citizen Preferred** **The work will entail:** The candidate will join a multi-disciplinary team of scientists working to advance the current state-of-the-art in advanced metrologies to characterize, test, model, and validate the structure-processing-property relationships of polymeric materials and material interfaces for heterogeneous integration in semiconductor packaging. The candidate will plan and conduct research on the use of Brillouin, low-frequency Raman (LFR) and fluorescence lifetime imaging (FLIM) microscopy to study the local mechanical properties of materials relevant to semiconductor packaging applications. This position will be a one-year appointment. **Key responsibilities will include but are not limited to:** - Plan, design, and characterize the performance of advanced microscopes based on Brillouin scattering, Raman scattering and fluorescence lifetimes - Characterize the mechanical properties of complex polymeric materials using these microscopy methods - Collaborate with a multi-disciplinary team working to characterize, test, and model polymeric materials relevant to semiconductor packaging applications - Participate in the ch