Computational Engineering Associate

The Cardiovascular Biomechanics Computation Lab at Stanford University (Dr. Marsden, PI) performs computational modeling of the cardiovascular system to support surgical planning in pediatric and adult patients, medical device design, and basic research in cardiovascular biomechanics and mechanobiology. As part of its mission, the lab leads the development of the SimVascular open-source project, the leading software package for patient-specific modeling and blood flow simulation. The lab also supports the Vascular Model Repository (VMR), which provides over 300 freely available SimVascular-compatible projects from various anatomies and diseases.

The lab is seeking a Science and Engineering Associate 1 to perform advanced computational engineering tasks in support of the VMR and SimVascular projects. Specific tasks will include data curation and database expansion, database management, website and data server maintenance, data archiving, working with Stanford libraries, and creating computational tools such as Python scripts for data processing to support artificial intelligence and machine learning efforts in cardiovascular imaging and modeling. The candidate will collaborate with Stanford libraries to ensure data integrity and facilitate the integration of new datasets into the Vascular Model Repository (https://vascularmodel.com). Additionally, they will update and maintain comprehensive documentation (https://vascularmodel.com/documentation.html) for the repository, encompassing medical images, 3D anatomical models, meshes, and blood flow simulation results, ensuring accessibility and usability for researchers and engineers. They will also assist the lead software engineer for Sim Vascular by ensuring software task completion, and managing updates and enhancements for the SimVascular software platform, ensuring that the latest versions and features are available and usable (https://simvascular.github.io).

The ideal candidate will collaborate with Marsden lab members as well as project collaborators across the university and other external research institutions. They should have experience with computer programming (e.g., Python), possess excellent communication skills, a collaborative attitude, and the ability to work effectively in a team environment.

Duties include:

·       Support complex scientific and research programs related to computational cardiology and biomechanics; analyze data, perform data curation and data archiving tasks, and expand existing data repositories.

·       Collaborate with team members (graduate students and postdocs in the Marsden lab as well as outside collaborators and users of SimVascular) to gather and archive data for public release in repositories.

·       Assist with source code testing and open-source project management for the VMR and SimVascular as needed, such as answering questions posted in the user forum or trouble-shooting issues encountered by users in the research community.

·       Carry out independent activities to write computer code (e.g. developing custom Python scripts) for data retrieval from repositories in support of AI-readiness or validation and data curation tasks. Create databases and methods for public machine learning challenges.

·       Collaborate with senior engineers and scientists to maintain and support open source and open data projects and websites. Assist with providing user support to the broader research community.

·       Work with Stanford libraries to create professional data archiving methods with assigned DOIs. Create appropriate interfaces between data archives and public websites.

·       Create online documentation, website resources, and educational materials related to open source (SimVascular) and open data (VMR) projects and make them available to the public via the project websites.

·       Assist with project planning to ensure ongoing sustainability of open source and open data resources supported by the lab.

·       Regularly communicate progress to the PI (Dr. Marsden) and discuss goals in bi-weekly meetings.

·       Some administrative duties such as equipment purchase, lab member onboarding, and monitoring usage of computing resources.

* - Other duties may also be assigned

Stanford University provides pay ranges representing its good faith estimate of what the University reasonably expects to pay for a position. The pay offered to a selected candidate will be determined based on factors such as (but not limited to) the scope and responsibilities of the position, the qualifications of the selected candidate, departmental budget availability, internal equity, geographic location, and external market pay for comparable jobs. The pay range for this position working in the California Bay area is $91,339.00 to $119,362.00 annually.