Post Tagged with: "Union of Concerned Scientists"

Job Alert: Senior Engineer/Scientist (Clean Vehicles Program) – Union of Concerned Scientists, Washington, DC or Berkeley, CA

December 5, 2012 at 4:39 pm
Union of Concerned Scientists

Union of Concerned Scientists (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Job Description

Senior Engineer/Scientist
Clean Vehicles Program
Union of Concerned Scientists
Location choice: Washington, DC or Berkeley, CA Office

The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), the leading science-based organization at the center of today’s most exciting and important policy debates, seeks an individual to work with a top-notch, multi-disciplinary team in our Clean Vehicles Program to advance sound transportation policy to cut oil use and protect public health. UCS is seeking a senior engineer/scientist to conduct research and analysis and serve as a lead spokesperson focused on solutions that save oil and reduce climate emissions, fuel economy, electric vehicles, and related technology and policy issues. Candidates must have a strong background in vehicle and fuel technology and transportation policy and excellent written and oral communication skills.

Responsibilities

The Senior Engineer/Scientist will help lead UCS efforts to evaluate potential transportation sector policy and technology solutions to cut projected US oil use in half within twenty years and significantly reduce transportation related pollution.

The person in this position will

  • generate reports on oil savings, fuel economy, and electric vehicle technology, develop related policies;
  • serve as a technical expert and a lead spokesperson to media, government and key allies;
  • provide technical information and expertise through testimony, written materials and public speaking;
  • actively promote promising legislation at federal and state levels;
  • assist in developing and managing regulatory campaigns on key oil and transportation-related issues.

Desired Skills & Experience

Qualifications and experience

This position requires five to seven years of related experience for candidates with masters or equivalent experience, including background in research and policy development and analysis. Candidate must have experience communicating technical issues to a non-technical audience through written products and presentations. Candidate should have knowledge of the transportation field, including vehicle and fuel technology, infrastructure, and industries. Candidate should have familiarity with current oil and transportation issues and their political/social/environmental/economic ramifications.  Position requires an understanding of public policy aspects of transportation and related climate and oil issues and the role of technical analyses and advocacy in shaping public opinion and policy debates.

Applicants must have strong quantitative and research skills; strong writing and verbal skills; proficiency with spreadsheet and word processing software; ability to write well for scientific and general audiences; familiarity with economics and public policy; and a team orientation.  Experience with project management, policymakers and the media a plus.

At UCS, comparable training and/or experience can be substituted for degrees when appropriate.

Company Description

The Union of Concerned Scientists is the leading U.S. science-based nonprofit organization working for a healthy environment and a safer world. Founded in 1969, UCS is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and also has offices in Berkeley, Chicago and Washington, D.C. For more information, go to www.ucsusa.org.

Additional Information

Compensation, Hours and Location: This is a full time position based in either UCS’s Washington, DC or Berkeley, CA office. For candidates who meet all position requirements, the salary is in the high $70,000s. UCS offers excellent benefits and is an equal opportunity employer continually seeking to diversify its staff. Information about UCS is available at http://www.ucsusa.org

To Apply: Please submit a cover letter, a technical writing sample and a general audience writing sample, salary requirements, how you learned about the position and resume via email to jobs@ucsusa.org and include “Senior Engineer/Scientist” in the subject line. Email materials in Word or PDF format only. No phone calls please. Deadline: December 14, 2012 or until filled.

Posted: November 28, 2012

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Paradigm Shift Does G.M.’s P.U.M.A. Rethink Transportation?

April 8, 2009 at 12:13 pm
G.M.'s P.U.M.A. Concept

The Project P.U.M.A. prototype on 18th Street in Manhattan.

 (Source: Wheels Blog – New York Times)

When General Motors unveiled Project P.U.M.A. in New York on Tuesday (with partner Segway), it was showing not so much a vehicle as a vision for a new transportation system. And that’s high risk, high reward, because as much as new concepts are needed, they’re excruciatingly hard to actually put in place. Our highways are haunted with unfulfilled visions, from electric station-cars to statewide hydrogen-refueling networks.

The P.U.M.A. is a two-wheeled, two-seat gyroscopically balanced urban transit device with a top speed of 35 miles an hour and the potential to be remotely operated. Toyota has also shown a fanciful personal mobility option, called the i-Swing, a single-seater pod on wheels, with joystick controls.

So far, the P.U.M.A. concept is receiving cautiously optimistic reviews. “It’s exactly the right vision, and it’s the kind of thinking we need desperately in transportation,” said Dan Sperling, director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California-Davis and coauthor (with Deborah Gordon) of “Two Billion Cars: Driving Toward Sustainability.”

Mr. Sperling points out that the Low-Speed Vehicle (L.S.V.) category, limited in most states to 35 miles an hour, was created by the Department of Transportation in the 1990s to respond to the type of technology that G.M. is now talking about.

The L.S.V. category, which includes battery-powered neighborhood electric vehicles, has been slow to take off. But Mr. Sperling said he saw those vehicles, including the Chrysler GEM, gaining popularity around Davis for use in retirement and gated communities, military bases and office parks. “We need more diversity of vehicle types,” he said. “There’s no reason everything has to be 3,000-plus-pound cars and trucks. But for this to take off it needs one extra step to integrate the vehicles into the broader network of roads.”

 

For David J. Friedman, research director for the clean vehicles program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, the P.U.M.A. has possibilities, though what he called “the massive monitoring and managing of traffic to minimize congestion and maximize road usage” has been tried before; the general category is called Intelligent Transportation Systems. G.M. experimented with hands-free Buicks on automated highways in 1997, but the efforts were thwarted by high costs and driver confusion.

“We need to design our cities around something other than two- or three-ton vehicles,” said Mr. Friedman. “The data suggests that by 2030 half of the built environment in the U.S. will be new. What if we designed new suburban towns with integrated shopping so you could walk, bike or use a P.U.M.A. to get around, with conventional vehicles only for longer trips?”

 

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