Berkeley Eviction Research and Computational Social Science Postdoc
Posted: 3/25/2023 (Employment)
U.C. Berkeley’s Urban Displacement Project (UDP – urbandisplacement.org) and Eviction Research Network (ERN – evictionresearch.net) at the Institute of Governmental Studies, Berkeley Institute of Data Science (BIDS), and the Department of Sociology has an opening for a 2-year post-doctoral position beginning June 2023 on evaluating eviction outcomes during the pandemic and teaching computational social science. The successful candidate will be appointed part-time as a postdoc, with approximately two-thirds time devoted to research over the course of two-years, and part-time as a lecturer.
The eviction project is a HUD funded grant that investigates how the U.S. Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP) impacted eviction outcomes using a novel longitudinal eviction database. This project will create one of the first longitudinal eviction databases using large public and private datasets, linking records across multiple datasets with personal identifiable information, and utilizing Bayesian and machine learning models to predict neighborhood and household drivers and outcomes of eviction. The purpose of this research is to identify the racial and gender disparities in eviction, displacement, and economic gaps that perpetuate unequal outcomes for different groups and inform policy. The candidate will co-author publications with the PI and team as well as be able to use this database for future research. The remaining candidate time will be devoted to teaching computational social science to graduate students in the social sciences and related fields in a two-semester course sequence that covers reproducibility and transparency, applied machine learning, natural language processing, and causal inference within the Department of Sociology.
The candidate will be part of the Sociology, Urban Planning, and BIDS community, working closely with Dr. Tim Thomas (UDP) and Professor David Harding (Sociology), and will play a vital role in training students in the growing field of computational social science. The team will publish evidence-based research in academic journals and use these findings to directly inform national, state, and local government agencies on how to reduce eviction and housing inequity.
Deadline: 04/01/2023