Work with ITRG

Work at NIST! Join us and be part of a team providing research or support toward efforts that stimulate innovation, foster industrial competitiveness, and improve quality of life. Search openings at USAjobs or NIST current job openings. 

Learn more about the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the Communication Technology Laboratory, and the Internet Technologies Research Group at its Gaithersburg MD campus.  

• For a quick overview of "What is NIST?" and what it is like to work here, see NIST Careers and/or explore the NIST social media portal.
• To explore life at NIST for students and visiting researchers, see NIST Guest Researchers Association.

Contact: itrg-contact [at] nist.gov (subject: Interest%20in%20working%20with%20ITRG) (itrg-contact[at]nist[dot]gov) to learn more, or discuss applying for any of the opportunities listed below. 

Types of Positions / Opportunities:

• Full-Time Staff Positions - Open to U.S. citizens. Specific current vacancies will be posted on the USAJobs site (search in location 20899).  We are always interested in being contacted by outstanding candidates with interests or experience in the topic areas described below.  See general information (pay, benefits, work-life programs, etc.) on Careers at NIST.
  • ITRG is always looking for highly motivated candidates who can contribute to NIST’s research and development projects that design, model, analyze, prototype, test, measure, and standardize cutting-edge technologies for advanced networking and distributed information systems. New employees will contribute to NIST research through design and analysis, development of software, design, and execution of modeling and measurement experiments, data analysis and visualization, publishing of research results, and participation in consensus standards development processes.  If interested contact itrg-contact [at] nist.gov (subject: Interest%20in%20working%20with%20ITRG) (itrg-contact[at]nist[dot]gov) to start the conversation about your career at NIST.
• Faculty Appointments - NIST employs faculty staff from academia.  Individuals hired are given a one-year, excepted service appointment which can be renewed.  Employment may last through the summer only or throughout the year.  Typical working arrangements are full-time for sabbaticals and summers, or part-time through the academic year.  Potential applicants should contact itrg-contact [at] nist.gov (subject: Interest%20in%20working%20with%20ITRG) (itrg-contact[at]nist[dot]gov) with their detailed resume/curriculum vitae and a brief statement of interest in one or more of the topics below.

• NRC Postdoctoral Research Associateships - Open to U.S. citizens (non-citizen postdocs, see Foreign Guest Research below). Candidates and their research proposals are evaluated in a competitive process managed by the National Research Council (NRC) Associateship Programs. Application deadlines are typically February 1 and August 1. These two-year postdoctoral appointments commence within one year of selection.  Areas of interest include but are not limited to the topics described below.
  • For more general information, see NIST NRC Postdoctoral Research Associateship Program
  • Applicants are sought for multiple postdoctoral research positions.
  • Potential applicants are strongly encouraged to discuss potential proposals (contact itrg-contact [at] nist.gov (subject: Interest%20in%20working%20with%20ITRG) (itrg-contact[at]nist[dot]gov)) before submission.

• The Professional Research Experience Program (PREP) is designed to provide valuable laboratory experience and financial assistance to undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, and faculty.  The program is intended to assure the continued growth and progress of a highly-skilled science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) workforce in the United States. Read more here
• The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) is designed to inspire undergraduate students to pursue careers in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) through a unique research experience that supports the NIST mission. Read more here. 
• NIST Graduate Student Measurement Science and Engineering (GMSE) Fellowship Program provides doctoral-level graduate students with opportunities and financial assistance to obtain laboratory experience within the NIST laboratories in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines related to NIST measurement science and engineering research. Read more here. 
• The Summer High School Intern Program (SHIP) is a NIST-wide summer intern program for students who will have finished their junior or senior year of high school by the start of the program and are interested in scientific research only. Read more here. 
  • Note: CyberCorps Scholarship for Service (SFS) students, NIST internships count toward your required Federal service.
    • Please contact itrg-contact [at] nist.gov (subject: Interest%20in%20working%20with%20ITRG) (itrg-contact[at]nist[dot]gov) to start the conversation about your internship at NIST (and allow us to be on the lookout for your application).

• Domestic/ Foreign Guest Research Positions - Several guest researcher appointments ranging from 1 to 5 years with, with stipends from $3,600 to $4,500 per month (for those without support from their home organization) are available.  Topic areas and desirable skills/interests are described below. Applicants are currently sought for new guest researcher positions with appointments to begin in the January - June time frame.  Minimum appointment is 1 year, maximum appointment is 5 years.  Potential applicants should contact itrg-contact [at] nist.gov (subject: Interest%20in%20working%20with%20ITRG) (itrg-contact[at]nist[dot]gov) with their detailed resume / curriculum vitae and a brief statement of your interests in one or more of the topics below.

• Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Grants - The list of specific SBIR topics and call for proposals typically goes out early in the calendar year with short (~2 month) submission deadline.    See the NIST SBIR site for application details. For more examples see the list of SBIR Past Awards.

Technical Topic Areas / Expertise of Interest:

The group's programmatic focus is upon Trustworthy Networks, where we work to establish the technical basis necessary to improve the security, resilience and performance of the communication infrastructures that underly our network-centric society. Our research cultivates trust in current and emerging network technologies by developing and applying innovative measurement techniques, improving the quality and timeliness of consensus standards, and providing tools and guidance necessary to expedite adoption of advanced network technologies.  ITL collaborates directly with leading industry research (Internet Research Task Force), standards (Internet Engineering Task Force) and network operations (North American Network Operators Group) groups to leverage NIST contributions and  foster the design, standardization and commercial deployment of solutions to systemic vulnerabilities and robustness issues in the core Internet technologies.

Major technical areas within this program include:

• The Trustworthy Intelligent Networks project works with industry and academia to improve the trustworthiness and applicability of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to future networks and distributed systems.  Our research focuses on applications of AI/ML to address security and robustness issues today's networks and developing means to test and measure the robustness of AI/ML techniques necessary for future autonomic networks.
• The Robust Inter-Domain Routing effort includes collaborative research with leading Internet companies to design and standardize technologies to improve the resilience and security of the Internet’s global routing system. It focuses on developing and fostering deployment of mitigation techniques for attacks and misconfigurations that result in large-scale Internet outages.
• The High Assurance Domains project works with the IETF, Messaging Malware Mobile and Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG), Department of Defense and the Federal CIO Council to research and develop new technologies to address key trust and security issues in enterprise networks. The current focus of this effort is on the development of a reference architecture and evaluation techniques for emerging Zero Trust Networks.
• The Software Defined and Virtual Networks project works to develop test and measurement techniques to advance the state of the art in network virtualization, network service function chaining, software defined networks, technologies and techniques to address robustness and security of virtualized network services.  Our work explores novel applications of NFV/SDN to domains such as network security and intrusion detection,  support of machine to machine communications, support of advanced mobility and cloud computing.  A key component of this research is the development of enabling programmable measurement techniques that can efficiently operate at the scale and speed of advanced networks.
• The Trustworthy Network of Things project works with industry to design, standardize, test and foster adoption of network-centric approaches to protect IoT devices from the Internet and to protect the Internet from IoT devices.  Our current efforts focus on the research and development manufacturer usage description (MUD) and secure device onboardings technologies.
• The USGv6 Program works with the IETF and Federal CIO community to provide technical leadership in standards profiles, product testing programs, and deployment guidance to foster the global transition to the next generation Internet Protocol (IPv6).
• The Measurement Science for Complex Information Systems project aims to develop and evaluate a coherent set of methods to understand behavior in complex information systems, such as the Internet, computational grids and computing clouds. Such large distributed systems exhibit global behavior arising from independent decisions made by many simultaneous actors, which adapt their behavior based on local measurements of system state. Actor adaptations shift the global system state, influencing subsequent measurements, leading to further adaptations. This continuous cycle of measurement and adaptation drives a time-varying global behavior. For this reason, proposed changes in actor decision algorithms must be examined at large spatiotemporal scale in order to predict system behavior. 

Please see each project for details of our contributions including research publications, standards specifications, software tools, guidance documents, workshops, etc.