Research Specialist

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is a leading institution in innovative teaching and research. They are seeking a Research Specialist to contribute to the Center for Climate Leadership and AI-driven Integrity in Mitigation, focusing on the use of artificial intelligence for climate mitigation strategies.

Responsibilities

• Research the use of LLMs as tools for mitigation strategy and accountability and scrutinize them as systems that can reproduce bias, misinformation, or greenwashing unless carefully benchmarked
• Develop, adapt, and evaluate LLM/genAI systems for climate mitigation intelligence, especially for tracking and assessing commitments and actions by cities, regions, and non-state actors
• Design and validate benchmarks, metrics, and auditing pipelines that test the accuracy, credibility, fairness, and robustness of LLM outputs related to climate targets, disclosures, and policy claims
• Rigorously test genAI/ML models against misinformation, disinformation, and greenwashing, including stress-testing models under adversarial, low-resource, and multilingual settings
• Study how generative AI shapes real-world climate behavior, including impacts on corporate and subnational mitigation planning, transparency, and accountability
• Contribute to CLAIM’s broader mission: data collection, methodological innovation, open tools, papers, and policy-facing outputs that improve climate commitment integrity

Skills

• Bachelor's degree in a discipline related to the area of assignment; or equivalent combination of training and experience. All degrees must be received from appropriately accredited institutions
• Course work in Computer Science, Computing, Statistics Data Science, or related disciplines
• Demonstrated hands-on experience training, fine-tuning, or adapting LLMs / generative AI models (e.g., instruction tuning, domain adaptation, RAG pipelines), with evidence in open-source code or deployed tools
• Solid programming and ML/ NLP engineering skills in Python or ideally modern deep-learning stacks (e.g., PyTorch/ JAX , HuggingFace/Transformers, vector databases, agentic/ RAG tooling), with ability to build reproducible research pipelines
• Proactive with ability to work in an interdisciplinary team environment
• Working knowledge of climate change mitigation or environmental governance, including familiarity with climate commitments, emissions accounting, or policy/action tracking

Benefits

• Professional training opportunities for career growth
• Skill development and lifelong learning
• Exclusive perks that include numerous retail and restaurant discounts
• Savings on local child care centers
• Special rates for performing arts events

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