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

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.

Penn State is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to providing employment opportunities to all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or protected veteran status. If you are unable to use our online application process due to an impairment or disability, please contact 814-865-1473.

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