Hiring season is officially open! We posted our job ad for postdocs today at the Center for Computational Mathematics (CCM) at the Flatiron Institute. Applications are due 15 December 2021 for positions starting summer/fall 2022. Initial appointments are for two years with a baked-in one-year extension available. Here’s the link with full details of how to apply.
Postdoc job ad: Flatiron Research Fellow, ML and Comp Stats
We’re also hiring for permanent research scientist positions.
Research scientist job ad: Flatiron Research Scientist, Open Rank
Our mission statement sums up what we do pretty well.
CCM’s mission is to create new mathematical approaches, algorithms and software to advance scientific research in multiple disciplines, often in collaboration with other Flatiron Centers.
More specifically, members of our center work on methodology, applications, and theory for computational stats and machine learning, as well as more traditional scientific computing in the form of optimization, differential equation solvers, non-uniform FFTs, phase retrieval, etc. I (Bob Carpenter) am here full time, as is Brian Ward, a software engineer who’s been working on the Stan language, CmdStan and CmdStanPy. Yuling Yao, a former Ph.D. student of Andrew’s, has joined as a postdoc (he’s the obvious person to ask about the postdoc experience). I’m sharing an office with Dave Blei while he’s here on sabbatical and we have other great visitors tentatively lined up (if you’d like to visit for a leave or a sabbatical, please drop me a line).
Although most of our permanent staff researchers and software engineers work on open-source software, we realize postdocs need to get a job, so we give them the flexibility to concentrate on research. We also understand that research is an international collaborative effort and we encourage postdocs and research scientists to maintain and develop academic collaborations outside of Flatiron Institute.
My favorite part of this place is that it’s packed to the rafters with scientists working on deep and interesting problems across the biological and physical sciences (our other centers are for computational astronomy, computational biology, computational neuroscience, and computational quantum physics).
I’m afraid we don’t do social science or humanities computing and are unlikely to hire anyone who’s concentrated mainly in these areas. The centers run popular science talks for each other on a weekly basis, which are really wonderful because they’re pitched at mathematically- and computationally-oriented scientists (so they assume you know basic physics and differential equations). Another great benefit is our computing clusters, which have state of the art GPU support and support from our high-performance computing experts who can help get your C++, Fortran, or even Python code running efficiently on the cluster.
Like continental Europe and the old Bell Labs, we have a very pleasant lunch culture where we eat together (the picture above is our cafeteria).
We also have really great admin support at all levels. Even our security guards are friendly and helpful. We’re one of the few places that has sufficient meeting rooms for our staff size (as well as great professional AV support). We’re also one of those places with chalkboards and white boards in all the halls, and it feels very welcoming to be surrounded by mathematical scribbling (that’s my office you can see behind Christian Mueller writing on the blackboard below).
Flatiron Institute is part of the Simons Foundation, which is one of the largest non-governmental science funders. Simons Foundation also runs all kinds of popular outreach programs around math and science education and engagement, including Quanta Magazine and Sandbox Films (science documentaries), as well as a large autism research institute dedicated to open-access data collection and curation.
We have very nice digs in the Flatiron neighborhood of NYC. The office is right on Fifth Avenue, only a few blocks from Greenwich Village (NYU and subsidized postdoc housing) and Chelsea (Google and the Hudson River).
We’re pretty much 100% back to the office. Simons Foundation requires vaccinations to get into the building and all employees have to get weekly swab PCR tests for Covid.
If you’re interested in a postdoc or research scientist position on the computational stats side of CCM, please send me an email ([email protected]).