The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) seeks an agent to conduct data collection and related activities for the National Prisoner Statistics program (NPS) and the National Corrections Reporting Program (NCRP). This award covers the four collection cycles for reporting years 2020 through 2024. The project period is October 1 2020, through September 30, 2025.These two programs were first competed together for the RY 2014-2019 award.  The current funding is for the first 3 years of the award; the final 2 years will be funded upon successful completion of 2020-2022 data.

The NPS and NCRP are BJS’s flagship data collections measuring the size and composition of state and federal prison populations on an annual basis. The two collections complement each other by obtaining aggregate and detailed individual-level information on prisoners, which is used to describe and compare the prison population over time. The NPS collects aggregate counts of the male and female custody and jurisdictional prison populations as of December 31 each year. State departments of corrections (DOCs) and the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) use their administrative records to tally their prison populations by jurisdiction, types of prison admissions and releases during the past year, race/Hispanic origin, and capacity of the facilities that hold prisoners in their custody. NPS also provides annual information on the number of confirmed cases of HIV/AIDS and current testing policies for these conditions. NPS has been collected annually since 1926, and these data are used in BJS’s Prisoners series and Corrections Populations in the United States series bulletins.

The NIJ Graduate Research Fellowship (GRF) program supports doctoral students engaged in research that advances NIJ’s mission.

The goal of the GRF program is to increase the pool of scholars engaged in research that addresses the challenges of crime and justice in the United States, particularly at the state and local levels.

This Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) invites applications for the next 5-year cycle of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) to include a sixth wave of data collection (Wave VI). Add Health is a nationally representative, longitudinal study of individuals primarily born from 1976 through 1982 who were first interviewed as adolescents in grades 7-12 (ages 12-19) in 1994-1995. Add Health respondents are now entering middle age. The goals for Add Health Wave VI are to:

1. Re-interview Add Health cohort members in a combination of web-based and in-person modes, including aggressive non-response follow-up and oversamples of race/ethnic-minority and low-socioeconomic-status individuals.
2. Re-visit cohort members for an in-home health exam that includes venous blood collection.
3. Assay biological specimens for biomarkers of disease.
4. Enrich measures in domains that may elucidate mid- and later-life health and disparities therein (e.g., cumulative stress, discrimination, work-life balance, caregiving).
5. Clean, document, disseminate, archive (including storage of biological specimens for future study), and promote the Wave VI data to the scientific community for aging research.

The FY20 Defense Appropriations Act provides funding to the Department of Defense Peer Reviewed Medical Research Program (PRMRP) to support medical research projects of clear scientific merit and direct relevance to military health. As directed by the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs, the Defense Health Agency J9, Research and Development Directorate manages the Defense Health Program (DHP) Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation (RDT&E) appropriation. The managing agent for the anticipated Program Announcements/Funding Opportunities is the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs (CDMRP) at the U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command (USAMRDC).

Viewpoint Consulting is seeking a scholar (or team of scholars) to support a peer learning project focused on helping foundations and other philanthropic organizations effectively collect, analyze and use demographic data on the groups they support and the communities they impact through their grantmaking.  The project needs support around best practice with respect to survey design and analysis for capturing race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, age and other key demographic factors.  The support will be delivered through

1)    Presentations to groups of foundation staff thru webinars and possibly in-person meetings on basic issues related to demographic data collection

2)    Preparation of FAQs sheets on good practice around demographic data collection in general and on hard to see populations

3)    One-on-one coaching with smaller cohorts of individual foundation staff

The project will ultimately produce a guide and potential training curriculum on demographic data issues that reflect the unique processes, systems and cultures of foundations.

*Required experience*

·      Expertise with demographic survey design

·      Familiarity with current issues and concerns related to demographic data on race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender identity and their intersection

·      Presenting to lay (non-academic) audiences on demographics

*Preferred experience*

·      Familiarity with nonprofit and/or foundations

·      Experience with using demographic data in applied settings

Initial Contract would be time and materials for

·      Three presentations over six months

·      1 FAQ fact sheet

·      8-10 hrs of one on one or small group coaching

If you are interested in being considered, please contact Kelly Brown at Kelly@viewptconsulting.com.

The Center for Data Science for Enterprise & Society at Cornell University announces a new program to recruit multiple candidates to be hired as Research Assistant Professors; these are 3-year non-tenure-track positions that are funded in part by the Center and in part by a cooperating unit at Cornell University, either at the Ithaca campus or at Cornell Tech in New York City. The first cohort recruited for this program will start in academic year 2020-2021.

This new Center aims to unify programs and curricula in data science with an initial emphasis on questions grounded in data that are generated by human activity, including computational social science (e.g., sociology and government), the economics/computer science interface, the aspects of digital agriculture in the production and management of agriculture, digital platforms supporting urban infrastructure (e.g., the sharing economy), and as a theme that is cross-cutting in many of these areas, the corresponding issues of privacy, security, and fairness. The areas highlighted are meant to serve only as illustrative; candidates for these Research Assistant Professorships are sought from all areas of research that either advance the state of the art in data science, or extend the reach of data-driven research into novel application domains.

Applicants should submit their curriculum vitae (CV) and a research statement summarizing their accomplishments to date, as well as a diversity statement; they must also submit a two-page description of proposed research for the period to be spent at the Center, including a proposed primary Cornell faculty member to mentor the candidate (and potentially a secondary mentor to span both some relevant area from the application domain as well as someone from a core data science domain);  two letters of recommendation and a reference letter of support from the Cornell faculty mentor(s). Candidates are expected to have completed their Ph.D. prior to the start of this position, and to have already done substantial research in areas relevant to the Center. Applications should be submitted by February 15, 2020 for full consideration, but applications will continue to be reviewed on an ongoing basis until the positions are filled.

Two postdoctoral appointments are offered for social scientists with excellent analytical and writing skills that have recently completed their PhD or will complete it by the summer of 2020. The candidates will join the project “Healthy lifespan inequality: Measurement, trends and determinants”, funded by the European Research Council as a Consolidator Grant to Dr. Iñaki Permanyer and hosted by the Center for Demographic Studies (CED) in Barcelona. HEALIN is a 5-year project that will start in June 2020.

The NSF ADVANCE program contributes to the National Science Foundation’s goal of a more diverse and capable science and engineering workforce.¹ In this solicitation, the NSF ADVANCE program seeks to build on prior NSF ADVANCE work and other research and literature concerning gender, racial, and ethnic equity. The NSF ADVANCE program goal is to broaden the implementation of evidence-based systemic change strategies that promote equity for STEM² faculty in academic workplaces and the academic profession. The NSF ADVANCE program provides grants to enhance the systemic factors that support equity and inclusion and to mitigate the systemic factors that create inequities in the academic profession and workplaces. Systemic (or organizational) inequities may exist in areas such as policy and practice as well as in organizational culture and climate. For example, practices in academic departments that result in the inequitable allocation of service or teaching assignments may impede research productivity, delay advancement, and create a culture of differential treatment and rewards. Similarly, policies and procedures that do not mitigate implicit bias in hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions could lead to women and racial and ethnic minorities being evaluated less favorably, perpetuating historical under-participation in STEM academic careers and contributing to an academic climate that is not inclusive.