Job Reference: 1191087
About us
The Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy (CIRA) is a multi-disciplinary research institute engaged in a range of projects involving or motivated by radio astronomy. CIRA’s activities draw together academic research and professional staff from a variety of science, engineering, and computing disciplines to tackle unique and demanding challenges in radio astronomy. CIRA is the lead organisation and operator of the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA), half of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), a member of the Australian SKA Regional Centre Joint Venture, and a key participant in the international SKA project.
CIRA celebrates diversity and is an equal opportunity employer. We encourage applications from all cultures, races, nationalities, genders, identities, and abilities meeting the requirements outlined in this role, and are committed to preserving our principles of equitable and inclusive work and study environments.
The Australian SKA Regional Centre (AusSRC)
The Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO) is an intergovernmental organisation tasked with building and operating the world’s largest radio telescopes. To fully exploit the scientific output of the immense amount of data flowing from the telescopes, the SKAO is working with science communities across the world through SKA Regional Centres (SRCs), which are nationally lead hubs containing infrastructure for supporting the science and computing required by this international community.
The Australian SKA Regional Centre (AusSRC) is Australia’s portion of this international network and has been funded – by the Australian Government through the Department of Industry, Science, and Resources (DISR) – $63 million from FY 2022/23 to 2030/31, to establish and build capability to support the Australian and international SKA science communities, thereby ushering in the next era of astronomical discovery and advanced data processing.
For the next few years of the AusSRC program, the primary focus will be on facilitating and enhancing the scientific output of Australian SKA Precursors: the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) and the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP). Working with science teams as well as local resource providers, the AusSRC will help to develop scalable post-processing and data analysis strategies and automated workflows that could eventually be applied to data from the SKA telescopes. Effort will also be directed to establishing and prototyping various aspects of the international SRC Network, including data distribution and archiving frameworks, operational requirements and pipelines, and user interfaces.