Location: Upton, NY
Cap-Exempt H-1B Position — No lottery required
Brookhaven National Laboratory’s National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II) is seeking an engineer to develop an automated protein crystal harvesting system at the Center for BioMolecular Structure (CBMS). ***This position is a 2-year term, with the possibility of renewal contingent on performance and funding availability*** The successful candidate will develop vision-guided robotic manipulation capabilities for detecting, tracking, and harvesting fragile micron-scale protein crystals suspended in liquid droplets. Working closely with a multidisciplinary team of crystallographers, beamline scientists, controls engineers, mechanical engineers, and data scientists, the candidate will help integrate computer vision, machine learning, and robotic manipulation into an automated crystal harvesting platform. This is a hands-on role centered on building and deploying closed-loop perception, visual servoing, and robotic control systems in a real laboratory environment. The position offers the opportunity to advance machine vision, robotic manipulation, and embodied AI techniques while addressing a scientifically impactful problem in structural biology. **Essential Duties and Responsibilities:** - Develop and implement vision-guided real-time robotic manipulation methods for crystal harvesting - Design and deploy closed-loop perception and control pipelines using visual feedback - Contribute to vision-based servoing approaches for precise, real-time positioning - Integrate perception outputs with motion planning and execution using ROS2 and MoveIt2 - Perform system calibration (e.g., hand-eye calibration, camera calibration) to ensure accurate 3D spatial alignment - Evaluate and improve system robustness, including perception uncertainty and failure modes - Collaborate closely with domain experts across crystallography, controls, and engineering - Participate in system testing, tuning, and performance evaluation - Document methods and results; contribute to reports, publ