Research Assistant (Contract)

Job Description
The Cooking Lab is the publisher of Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking (2011), Modernist Cuisine at Home (2012), Photography of Modernist Cuisine (2013), Modernist Bread (2017), Modernist Bread at Home (2023), and Modernist Pizza (2021).
The Cooking Lab includes a culinary team, an in-house publishing team, as well as a marketing and publicity team - All of the books that we have published have helped make the concepts behind avant-garde cooking, photography, and food science even more widely available. In addition to our award-winning books, The Cooking Lab provides consulting, R & D, and invention services to food companies and culinary equipment makers, large and small. Our research laboratory in Bellevue includes one of the best equipped kitchens in the world as well as access to a full set of machining, analytical, and computational facilities, provided by the Intellectual Ventures Lab.
This contract position is expected to be 40 hours per week onsite in our research laboratory in Bellevue, Washington starting in mid-May 2024.
The Cooking lab is looking for a Research Assistant to join the team on our journey to better understand food and cooking, focusing on Pastry research. The science of cooking involves numerous experiments where collecting data is key. In our state-of-the-art research kitchen, the traditional scientific laboratory equipment is used to provide information allowing to advance the state of modern cuisine through science, innovation and creativity. The Research Assistant will mostly focus on gathering data from these tools. Their functions will be including but not limited to:

• Measure the texture from a large variety of finished baked goods using an in-house texture analyzer.
• Assess the volume of baked goods by laser topography using a built-for-purpose 3D-scanner.
• Determine viscosity, pH and water activity of pastry preparations.
• Photograph the baked goods for documentation.
• All of the items that the Research Assistant has photographed, measured for texture and measured for volume will need to be properly documented and organized and passed on to the senior scientist and her assistant to process the results of each experiment.
• Provide demonstrations of the 3D-scanner for tours or video-recordings.
• Hands-on help with additional tasks relating to equipment use (analytical weigh measure, thermocouples and data logger);
• Ad hoc assistance during on-site events such as receptions and demonstrations.
• Reliable record-keeping essential.

In addition to our primary research, we are also interested in deeply analyzing recipes from around the world. We have a large, diverse library of baking and pastry books that are being used for this specific project. The Research Assistant will be participating in the effort to scan, catalog and upload the world's best baking recipes to create the world's largest database on the subject. Responsibilities include:

• Convert recipes from books into digital files by using our specialized book scanner;
• Label pages, convert them into appropriate file type and store the recipes on our internal server;
• Our proprietary data extraction tool is used to convert the information on each page to data points to be stored and then interpreted. These segments of importance need to be manually confirmed and saved to the database. Manual data entry or adjustment is often required to ensure all essential information is included.
• Closely interact with our Data Engineer to perform analysis on the resulting database to answer specific questions about the data and prepare graphs/charts of interest for a variety of scientific analysis and visualization projects.
• Maintain our library resources functional and user-friendly by inventorying and organizing our book collection.

Our team will train the candidate on the use of all of the specialized equipment and software as well as on how to organize and maintain all of the collected data.
This is not a culinary or pastry production position. The candidate will not be preparing food at any time.
Qualifications:

• The ideal candidate would have laboratory experience in analytical chemistry / analytical biochemistry or analytical biology.
• Strong data entry / record keeping skills.
• Familiarity with using Excel functions.
• Culinary science background a strong advantage.
• Meticulous, focused, comfortable with repetitive tasks, flexible, attention to detail, reliability, ability to work under pressure, troubleshooting skills.
• Local to Seattle area.

We are an equal opportunity employer