Director and Chief Scientific Officer Full-time

Director And Chief Scientific Officer

The Johns Hopkins University Human Language Technology Center of Excellence is a world-class research organization that addresses a unique set of exciting challenge problems to advance the state of the art in human language technologies.

The JHU HLTCOE seeks a highly respected, peer-recognized, leading researcher to serve as its Director and Chief Scientific Officer. Reporting to the School of Engineering's vice dean for research, the director is charged with leading the research activities of the HLTCOE to ensure it both maintains its leadership position and aligns with the needs of its government sponsor. This includes working collaboratively with HLTCOE researchers to extend their significant record of technical accomplishments, setting strategic directions, and identifying, recruiting, and mentoring new research staff.

HLTCOE researchers develop advanced algorithms for analyzing speech, text, and multimodal data in multiple languages, extracting useful information from massive amounts of text and speech over a wide range of languages and genres, striving to advance the state of the art in HLT in speech and text. Current problems focus on improvements in speech-to-text, automatic speaker and language identification, machine translation, multilingual and multimodal information retrieval and retrieval-augmented generation, entity extraction, and related topics.

Established in 2007, the HLTCOE is an integral component of JHU's wide-ranging research leadership in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. Notably, the HLTCOE collaborates closely with the JHU Center for Language and Speech Processing, and is connected to the larger DSAI community including the Center for Imaging Science, the Mathematical Institute for Data Science, and the Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics, to name but a few.

Qualifications

• Extensive experience in a related and relevant role
• Doctorate in an HLT-related field
• Proven leadership directing applied and theoretical efforts and managing research organizations
• Excellent communication skills for broad-ranging audiences
• Strong networking skills
• Ability to recognize, recruit, and mentor high quality researchers and staff
• Ability to instill and maintain a highly collaborative work environment that values employees
• Experienced in building consensus through engagement
• Has a current or recent TS/SCI clearance with full-scope polygraph (will consider candidates with a current or recent TS clearance)

Application Instructions

We are open to applicants from a variety of career trajectories including government, industry, and academia. Depending on their background, applicants may be appointed either in our Research Scientist track or as a professor in a relevant department.

Applications should be submitted to INTERFOLIO. For full consideration, applicants should submit their curriculum vitae and a cover letter that discusses background, qualifications, and interest in the position by June 30, 2026.

To ask general questions, request a preliminary discussion, or to nominate candidates, please contact Ed Scheinerman, interim director: ers@jhu.edu

This is a full-time position located in Baltimore, Maryland. Starting date to be negotiated on availability. Johns Hopkins is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer.