The School of Education at the University of California, Irvine is hiring two postdoctoral fellows for two years beginning with the 2013-14 academic year. Preferred start date is July 1, 2013. The fellowship includes a salary of $50,000 per year, plus health insurance, and funding for conference travel, professional development, and a computer fund.
Postdoctoral fellows will join an interdisciplinary research team housed in the School of Education and led by faculty with appointments in the School of Education, Department of Economics and Paul Merage School of Business. The heart of the research opportunities provided to fellows is a five-year NICHD-funded program project (P01) that was awarded recently to the University of California, Irvine (see http://inid.gse.uci.edu/). The program project’s principal goal is to understand why human capital intervention programs and policies, directed at children in the preschool, middle childhood and adolescent stages of development, have the effects, non-effects and, in some cases, perverse effects that they do. Taken together, the group’s collective and coordinated efforts constitute a research network called the Irvine Network on Interventions in Development. Fellows will be intimately involved in many facets of the Network’s activities. Greg Duncan serves as PI of the program project grant and is the PI for this postdoctoral fellowship grant.
Postdoctoral fellows will work on analyses of the specific policy interventions that are spread across the four projects. These include: 1) early childhood programs such as Head Start and Early Head Start (Project I – George Farkas, PI; Deborah Vandell and Greg Duncan, co-PIs); 2) state standards for health education curricula involving alcohol, tobacco and other drugs (Project II – Christopher Carpenter, PI); and 3) Head Start, school voucher programs and state policies regarding high-stakes exams for grade promotion and/or graduation (Project III – Marianne Bitler, PI). A fourth project (IV – Greg Duncan, PI) complements the first three by addressing the “so what?” question of the possible longer-run consequences of augmenting skills or improving behavior at various points in childhood and adolescence. Each of the projects is described on the Network’s website.
During their training, fellows will receive close mentoring from program faculty and will audit classes in child and adolescent development and research methods as needed. They will attend seminars and meetings, present their research at national research conferences, write papers, and hone their skills in specific methodological techniques. Techniques include randomized controlled trials, propensity score matching, instrumental variables, fixed effects, interrupted time series, regression discontinuity analysis, and quantile regression and other distributional estimators. In addition, fellows will gain practical experience by helping to plan and run large research projects and by supervising graduate student research assistants.
Qualifications: Applicants from a variety of disciplines (e.g., education, sociology, developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, economics and public policy) are encouraged to apply. Successful applicants must have a good command of quantitative methods used in the behavioral and social sciences. Due to U.S. Department of Education regulations, applicants must be U.S. citizens or permanent residents. Finally, applicants must have received their doctoral degree by the start date.
To Apply: Applications may be submitted after September 1. A letter of interest, curriculum vitae, three letters of reference and two publications or papers should be emailed to Andrea Karsh at akarsh@uci.edu. Your letter of interest must detail how your skills and interests match specific opportunities provided by the post-doctoral fellowship program as detailed in the P01 project proposal. We will begin reviewing applications October 15, 2012, so it is strongly recommended that all application materials be submitted by that date. Please direct administrative inquiries to Andrea Karsh at akarsh@uci.edu and substantive inquiries to Professor Greg Duncan at gduncan@uci.edu.
The University of California, Irvine is an equal opportunity employer committed to excellence through diversity and strongly encourages applications from all qualified applicants, including women and minorities.