Data Curator

Independently assist in the design, development, maintenance and support of a data management system.

The Harvard College Observatory (HCO) seeks an astronomical Data Curator to: 1) support and maintain curation of data sets generated by HCO researchers; and 2) assist researchers in efficiently integrating access to large cloud-based data sets (e.g. from Rubin, Roman, and other new surveys) and other data sets, including local resources.

The Data Curator will join the staff of the “Seamless Astronomy” effort at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian.  Seamless Astronomy brings together researchers, computer scientists, information scientists, librarians, and visualization experts, all of whom are involved in developing tools and systems to study and enable the next generation of astronomical research. 

• Create, maintain, and curate HCO data releases in the Harvard Dataverse and other online repositories. Assist in researcher-friendly curation of the Harvard Plate Stacks database.
• Facilitate access to external national and international datasets and services, integrating cloud-based sources with local research environments.
• In collaboration with Seamless Astronomy faculty leadership, help to design and test software and data management strategies (e.g. what balance of curator/PI time is optimal, what 3rd-party services should be supported (e.g. GitHub, Dataverse, Zenodo, Amazon AWS, etc.)
• Working with leaders representing various HCO faculty groups, implement software and data curation strategies for a variety of projects and data types.
• Ensure HCO’s data-sharing and curation practices meet or exceed the standards of leading external archives, whether hosted internally or externally
• Leverage AI tools to harmonize and integrate datasets, and assist HCO researchers in independently using AI data-management tools
• Participate in meetings with HCO and Harvard data science specialists; perform additional duties as assigned