Part-Time Research Assistant – Smeal Research Intelligence (SRI)

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JOB DESCRIPTION AND POSITION REQUIREMENTS

The Department of Supply Chain and Information Systems at Penn State University Park invites applications for one part-time research assistant with an anticipated start date in October 2026. The successful candidate will assist a team of Smeal faculty lead by Professor Aydin Alptekinoglu for up to 15 hours per week during the academic semester.

Job Duties:

• •Build and maintain an automated pipeline that collects Smeal faculty publications and working papers
• •Develop and test search and discovery tools over the repository
• •Support development of synthesis and "translation" features for faculty, research centers, marketing, and development
• •Test the system with a small pilot collection, then scale to the full collection

Required Qualifications:

• •Currently enrolled Penn State student
• •Strong Python skills, including writing maintainable scripts and working with application programming interfaces (APIs)
• •Experience collecting and cleaning data programmatically (e.g., scraping, working with publisher/scholarly APIs such as Crossref, Semantic Scholar, or SSRN, handling PDFs and metadata)
• •Familiarity with large language model (LLM) APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, or similar) and prompt design
• •Basic understanding of embeddings, vector search, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
• •Comfort with Git and basic software testing practices
• •Ability to work independently and document code and processes clearly

Preferred Qualifications:

• •Experience building a simple web app or dashboard (e.g., Streamlit, Flask, or similar) for search interfaces
• •Familiarity with academic publishing and how faculty research is organized (journals, working papers, citation metadata)
• •Experience with Digital Measures or similar faculty-activity systems
• •Awareness of copyright/paywall and data-privacy considerations when handling publications

Compensation:

Starting rate for this position is $16.00 per hour.

Candidates with questions may contact the department assistant, Autumn Knepp, at adh5253@psu.edu.

BACKGROUND CHECKS/CLEARANCES

Employment with the University will require successful completion of background check(s) in accordance with University policies.

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