Senior Research Assistant, Cloud-Based IoT System to Support Women Struggling with Drug Addictions - PSAC-RC

Competition Number: RC151.26
Date Posted: October 22, 2026
Department: Applied Computer Science
Researcher: Dr. Yaser Al Mtawa
Position Vacancies: 1
Salary: $20.11 per hour plus 6% vacation pay

Senior Research Assistants are normally graduate students, or University of Winnipeg undergraduate students, employed to assist in the execution and evaluation of research projects in their area of study. The positions may oversee Research Assistants in areas such as the use of proper techniques, analysis, and documentation.

Senior Research Assistants work under the general supervision or direction of more senior researchers or faculty members, and are expected to exercise judgment in prioritizing, planning and organizing their own work within defined parameters.

Position Overview:

This Senior Research Assistant (Sr. RA) position supports a research project focused on developing a Cloud-Based IoT System to Support Women Struggling with Drug Addiction During Pregnancy. The project aims to integrate IoT devices, cloud computing, healthcare data, and advanced AI techniques to enable continuous monitoring, risk assessment, and data-driven support for maternal healthcare.

The Sr. RA will contribute to the design and implementation of IoT and cloud-based system architectures, healthcare data processing pipelines, and intelligent analytics using methods such as Transformers, RNNs, GNNs, and time-series algorithms. The role also involves evaluating system performance, analyzing healthcare data, and supporting the development of secure, scalable, and reliable digital health solutions suitable for real-world deployment.

Duties:

- Design and develop a cloud-based IoT system for collecting, transmitting, processing, and analyzing health-related data from connected devices and sensors.
- Implement cloud services for secure data ingestion, storage, processing, analytics, visualization, and system monitoring.




- Develop and evaluate AI and machine-learning models for healthcare applications, including Transformers, RNNs/LSTMs/GRUs, GNNs, and time-series analysis algorithms.
- Perform preprocessing, cleaning, transformation, feature engineering, and statistical analysis of healthcare, IoT, and time-series datasets.
- Analyze temporal relationships and behavioral patterns associated with maternal health, pregnancy, and substance-use-related risk factors.
- Assist in documenting experimental results, preparing figures, and contributing to research publications.
- Collaborate with the research team to define milestones, validate models, and refine system-level evaluation metrics.

Qualifications:

- Master’s degree is required in Computer Science, Engineering, Applied Mathematics, or a related field.
- Robust programming skills in Python and experience implementing data-processing, machine-learning, or AI systems.
- Demonstrated experience working with Internet of Things (IoT) systems, connected devices, sensor-based applications, or distributed IoT architectures.
- Demonstrated experience working with healthcare, clinical, biomedical, physiological, or other health-related datasets.
- Familiarity with machine-learning and deep-learning frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, Keras, or equivalent frameworks.
- Experience with data-analysis libraries and scientific computing tools such as NumPy, pandas, SciPy, scikit-learn, and related Python ecosystems.
- Understanding of database systems and data pipelines, including SQL and/or NoSQL databases, APIs, cloud storage, and streaming or event-driven data processing.




- Ability to clearly document technical work and communicate research findings.
- Previous experience as a Research Assistant or in an academic research environment is strongly preferred.

Condition(s) of Employment:

- Must be legally entitled to work in Canada.

The period of work will be from Oct 29, 2026 - Apr 30, 2027, and the estimated total hours of work will be 0-780 hours (0-30 hours per week).

Note: This position is represented by the Public Service Alliance of Canada - Research Capacity Unit.

Note: The work described in this posting will be conducted in person.

The University of Winnipeg is committed to equity, diversity and inclusion and recognizes that a diverse staff and faculty benefits and enriches the work, learning and research environments, and is essential to academic and institutional excellence. We welcome applications from all qualified individuals and encourage women, racialized persons, Indigenous persons, persons with disabilities, and 2SLGBTQ+ persons to confidentially self-identify at time of application.

The University of Winnipeg is committed to ensuring employment opportunities are accessible for all applicants. If you require accommodation supports during the recruitment process, please contact [email protected]: mailto:[email protected].

The personal information of applicants is collected under the authority of the University of Winnipeg Act and 36(1)(b) of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. All personal information collected via the recruitment process is used to assess the applicant’s suitability, eligibility, and qualifications for employment, and to otherwise support recruitment activities. This information will be provided to participating members of the recruitment process. Questions regarding the collection of your personal information may be directed to the Director, HR Services, 515 Portage Avenue, Winnipeg, MB, R3B 2E9 or [email protected].

📌 Senior Research Assistant, Cloud-Based IoT System to Support Women Struggling with Drug Addictions (Winnipeg)
🏢 The University of Winnipeg
📍 Winnipeg