Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology

Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology & Anthropology

The Department of Sociology/ Anthropology at Earlham College, a progressive liberal arts college in Richmond, Indiana, invites applications for a three-year position in sociology or sociocultural anthropology as Visiting Assistant Professor beginning Fall 2018, with a PhD (or advanced ABD) required. We are especially interested in candidates with a research and teaching focus on one or more of the following: race/ethnicity/class, cities, media, education, health, mobile populations, sustainability, quantitative methods. Our department seeks candidates committed to excellence in undergraduate teaching, and to scholarly activity and active engagement with students. We anticipate that beyond the department, the successful candidate would also contribute to one of the following interdisciplinary programs: African and African American Studies, Human Development and Social Relations (an interdisciplinary program with Psych Dept. to prepare students to work with individuals, organizations, and public policy relating to social issues), Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Environmental Sustainability, International Studies, and Peace and Global Studies.

Applicants should send a cover letter detailing teaching and research interests, a CV and contact information for three references, a writing sample, and additional information you wish to include to: Cheri Gaddis: Sociology-Anthropologysearch@earlham.edu. Review of applications will begin December 4th and continue until position is filled.

Earlham College is an Equal Opportunity Employer that seeks applications from candidates who contribute to diversity in terms of race, ethnicity, age, religious affiliation, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, and veteran status, among other distinctions and contributions. As a College with a Quaker identity, Earlham also is eager to solicit applications from members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers).

Data Scientist

As part of its newly formed Advanced Analytics team, the Center for Government Excellence (GovEx) is seeking a Data Scientist. The GovEx Data Scientist will partner with municipal governments to use large and diverse volumes of data to deliver actionable insights on a variety of problems that matter to cities and their residents. In addition, the Data Scientist will help build the capacity of governments to pursue and complete data science projects independently.

The Data Scientist will play a critical role in the scoping, execution, and implementation of data science projects for What Works Cities. GovEx supports the work of nearly 90 cities and growing through this initiative. As such, this position offers a unique opportunity to help many municipal governments leverage information management, statistics, and computer science skills; and maintain an analytical methodology to surface viable opportunities and apply appropriate techniques.

GovEx’s Data Scientist also assists in providing training and other educational supports to select city partners furthering their own analytical capabilities and enhancing their impact. In addition, the Data Scientist contributes to published content about innovative solutions to pressing municipal problems, and creates high-impact resources and training materials to support the adoption of advanced analytical practices in government.

This position reports to the GovEx Chief Data Scientist.

Specific responsibilities for the Data Scientist include:

● Scope advanced analytics projects in municipalities, applying human-centered design thinking to build a thorough understanding of current needs and resources from multiple perspectives
● Design outcome-focused analytical processes to test and apply the best techniques to the problems at hand
● Write, update, and maintain computer programs, algorithms, software packages, and scripts that facilitate routine data hygiene and analytical tasks
● Peer review code developed by other members of the Advanced Analytics team
● Construct and document easy-to-execute analytic pipelines to easily recreate data science projects
● Test and validate analytical products for accuracy and bias, and implement solutions for mitigating issues as necessary
● Assess the impact of improvements delivered by Advanced Analytics projects through field tests conducted by cities and other evaluative methods
● Provide actionable insights into complex urban problems in a fast paced, collaborative and iterative analytical environment while securely and ethically using data to generate those solutions.
● Collaborate with computer science and data science resources at Johns Hopkins University and other key partners
● Contribute to a repository of best practices and identify new trends in the use of data science skills by governments
● Help develop curricula to support GovEx’s academic and training offerings

Qualifications

Bachelor’s degree or relevant work experience required, advanced degree preferred.Seven years related experince required.Advanced education may substitute for experience to the extent permitted by the JHU equivalency formula (18 graduate degree credits may substitute for one year of experience).

GovEx’s Data Scientist is a creative, curious, and collaborative professional proficient in statistics and computer science.

Qualifications include

● Experience using data and statistical concepts in research or applied settings to inform strategic decisions or solve complex problems
● Ability to understand, work with, and adapt to large and imperfect datasets
● Interest and ability to learn from and teach others, both internally and externally
● Proficiency in Python as a statistical package and programming language
● Experience using a SQL database and writing complex queries
● Proficiency in Microsoft Excel and Powerpoint
● Ability to work independently and in a results-oriented workplace

Pluses include

● A solid understanding of the types of challenges municipal governments typically face, either through direct experience working in government or in organizations that collaborate closely with governments
● Experience crafting narratives from analyses and preparing client-ready presentations
● Demonstrated interpersonal and communications skills, including giving presentations at conferences or to clients
● Experience applying human-centered design thinking to analytical processes or products
● Proficiency with data visualization tools, such as D3.js, Tableau, or Shiny
● Proficiency with statistical packages (R, STATA, SPSS, etc)
● Proficiency with PostgreSQL
● Familiarity with Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) tools such as PostGIS, QGIS, or ArcGIS
● Ability to write about technical subjects for a nontechnical audience

Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement

The National Park Service (NPS) and the National Park Foundation (NPF) invite scholars who are no more than three years beyond receipt of the doctorate to apply for a two-year National Park Service Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral fellowship, potentially renewable for one additional year. The Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement will begin in September 2018. This fellowship is made possible by support from the National Park Foundation through a generous grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

NPS has followed up the Civil War to Civil Rights commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War with an ongoing national effort to research and commemorate the many struggles for Civil Rights in America, with the intent to provide public opportunities to connect learning about the past to relevant issues today. NPS recognizes that the public humanities can both expand personal and societal knowledge and encourage the creative imagination needed to address social challenges rooted in history. NPS is committed to the transfer of knowledge to many publics through national parks and programs. The agency is also committed to sharing knowledge within the workforce, supporting our mission by providing learning and development for staff. The national park system has expanded significantly with the addition of new park units providing opportunities for NPS to tell more comprehensive national stories of all Americans. The Fellow’s research will assist new national park units, creating connections between them and other cultural and historical national parks to tell national stories more effectively. NPS is committed to developing effective audience-centered interpretation and K-12 educational materials to engage visitors (physical and virtual) in these stories, even when those stories can be contested and uncomfortable.

The Fellow will work with NPS mentors and as a member of a collaborative humanities research team of three Fellows. The Fellow will have a faculty mentor from the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation at the University of Mississippi. There are four project outcomes expected, each determined in consultation between the Fellow and their NPS and academic mentors.

Research. A. Baseline summary: The Fellow will assess and summarize current relevant scholarship, including explanation and assessment of a variety of theoretical orientations and varying perspectives, in order to make recommendations to the NPS about further humanities research that would support stewardship and educational needs pertinent to the theme of the fellowship. B. New or applied research: The Fellow will undertake research relevant to the theme of the fellowship.
Online seminars. The Fellow, as part of the research team, will make presentations to NPS staff service-wide via quarterly online seminars.
Interpretive or Educational products. The Fellow will develop interpretive or educational products based on their scholarly research.
Career-focused research and product. The Fellow will dedicate up to 20 percent of their time to pursue research on a career-centered project.

Applicants must possess US citizenship and have a Ph.D. in the humanities or humanistic social sciences by August 2018 (history, museology, archaeology, philosophy, ethnic studies, women’s studies, American Studies, anthropology, or related disciplines). Applicants must demonstrate comfort with working collaboratively and across disciplinary boundaries; excellent research, writing, and communication skills; flexibility and the capacity to learn quickly; and a strong interest in public scholarship. Selective factors include the merit of scholarship and promise, commitment to the public humanities, and capacity to complete research successfully. Fellowship is contingent upon a successful security background check.

Application: Applications must be submitted in pdf format by email only to CivilRights@nationalparks.org with the subject line: last name, first name – 2018-Legacy of Civil Rights Movement. For best consideration, apply by January 17, 2018.

Include:

cover letter stating interest and vision for the fellowship (letters may include a summary of the dissertation, a statement of personal research interests and plans, discussion of past engagement with public humanities, discussion of willingness to participate fully in NPS research and education programs);
comprehensive curriculum vitae;
writing sample accessible to the general public;
confirmation of Ph.D. award by August 1, 2018; and
three letters of recommendation. The letters of recommendation should be sent directly by the recommender to CivilRights@nationalparks.org with the subject line: LETTER last name, first name – 2018-Legacy of Civil Rights Movement.

The two-year Fellowship begins September 1, 2018 and ends August 30, 2020. The location is Washington, DC. NPS will provide the Fellow with a workstation. Compensation is $60,000 for year one and $61,800 for year two plus an annual $7,000 allowance for health benefits as well as research costs (conferences and publications) of $3,000 per year. One-time moving expenses of $1500 will be provided. Travel funding is provided for three NPS meetings per year and two additional trips to research-associated parks. The Fellowship may not be held concurrently with any other fellowship or grant, or employment (part-time or full-time).

Postdoctoral Fellowship in Gender and Sexuality Equality

The National Park Service (NPS) and the National Park Foundation (NPF) invite scholars who are no more than three years beyond receipt of the doctorate to apply for a two-year National Park Service Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral fellowship, potentially renewable for one additional year. The Postdoctoral Fellowship in Gender and Sexuality Equality will begin in September 2018. This fellowship is made possible by support from the National Park Foundation through a generous grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

NPS is forming a community of practice for Women’s History and is organizing for the commemoration of the 100th anniversary in 2020 of the 19th amendment to the Constitution, which states that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” In October 2016, NPS also released “LGBTQ America: A Theme Study of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer History,” demonstrating further a commitment to tell the stories of gender and sexual minorities and supplying a national context to begin to frame work at more local levels. The NPS realizes that the public humanities can both expand personal and societal knowledge and encourage the creative imagination needed to address social challenges rooted in history. The NPS is committed to the transfer of knowledge to many publics through national parks and programs and to providing public opportunities to connect learning about the past to relevant issues today. The agency is also committed to sharing knowledge within the workforce, supporting our mission by providing learning and development for staff. The national park system has expanded significantly with the addition of new park units providing opportunities for NPS to tell more comprehensive national stories of all Americans. The Fellow’s research will assist new national park units, creating connections between them and other cultural and historical national parks to tell national stories more effectively. NPS is committed to developing effective audience-centered interpretation and K-12 educational materials to engage visitors (physical and virtual) in these stories even when those stories can be contested and uncomfortable.

The Fellow will work with NPS mentors and as a member of a collaborative humanities research team of three Fellows. The Fellow will have a faculty mentor from the Department of History at Morgan State University. The Fellow will be instrumental in steering the work of the community of practice leading up to the national commemoration of the 2020 anniversary. While a major milestone is the anniversary, any commemoration of the struggles for Women’s Equality must be intersectional. There are four project outcomes expected, each determined in consultation between the Fellow and their NPS and academic mentors.

Research. A. Baseline summary: The Fellow will assess and summarize current relevant scholarship, including explanation and assessment of a variety of theoretical orientations and varying perspectives, in order to make recommendations to the NPS about further humanities research that would support stewardship and educational needs pertinent to the theme of the fellowship. B. New or applied research: The Fellow will undertake research relevant to the theme of the fellowship.
Online seminars. The Fellow, as part of the research team, will make presentations to NPS staff service-wide via quarterly online seminars.
Interpretive or Educational products. The Fellow will develop interpretive or educational products based on their scholarly research.
Career-focused research and product. The Fellow will dedicate up to 20 percent of their time to pursue research on a career-centered project.

Application: Applications must be submitted in pdf format by email only to GenderSexuality@nationalparks.org with the subject line: last name, first name – 2018-Gender. For best consideration, apply by January 17, 2018.

Include:

cover letter stating interest and vision for the fellowship (letters may include a summary of the dissertation, a statement of personal research interests and plans, discussion of past engagement with public humanities, discussion of willingness to participate fully in NPS research and education programs);
comprehensive curriculum vitae;
writing sample accessible to the general public;
confirmation of Ph.D. award by August 1, 2018; and
three letters of recommendation. The letters of recommendation should be sent directly by the recommender to GenderSexuality@nationalparks.org with the subject line: LETTER last name, first name – 2018-Gender.

The two-year Fellowship begins September 1, 2018 and ends August 30, 2020. The location is Philadelphia, PA. NPS will provide the Fellow with a workstation. Compensation is $60,000 for year one and $61,800 for year two plus an annual $7,000 allowance for health benefits as well as research costs (conferences and publications) of $3,000 per year. One-time moving expenses of $1500 will be provided. Travel funding is provided for three NPS meetings per year and two additional trips to research-associated parks. The Fellowship may not be held concurrently with any other fellowship or grant, or employment (part-time or full-time).

Who Can Live Life Like a Start-up? A Conversation About Opportunity and Inequality with Scott Allard and Arthur Brooks

Join Evans School Professor Scott Allard and American Enterprise Institute President Arthur Brooks in a conversation about how individuals can be entrepreneurial: who can live like a start-up, and who gets left behind? Light refreshments provided.

Audience members must register to be guaranteed a seat.

Dissertation Fellowships

CSSS Seminar: Record Linkage and Population Size Estimation for Counting Human Rights Violations

Mauricio Sadinle, Assistant Professor, Department of Biostatistics

In the context of a civil war, it is common for multiple organizations to maintain registries of human rights violations reports. These registries can, in principle, be used to address the common question of how many violations (have) occurred due to the war. While not all violations are reported, obtaining the number of single violations reported across organizations provides us with a lower bound on the total. This is often a nontrivial task, since violation reports typically lack unique identifiers and have name misspellings, typing errors, missingness, and other data quality issues. Probabilistic record linkage is used to identify coreferent reports and provide a probabilistic quantification of the uncertainty in the linkage process. Under additional assumptions, capture-recapture or multiple-systems estimation can be used to provide an estimate of the total number of violations using the results of the linkage step. In this talk we review record linkage and capture-recapture models, and present a Bayesian approach to incorporate the linkage uncertainty into the estimation of the total number of violations. We present a case study where our goal is to estimate the number of civilian casualties from the civil war of El Salvador.

Katie Baird Explores How Number of Ballot Drop Boxes Influences Voting Behavior in Washington

Affiliate Katie Bird, Associate Professor of Politics, Philosophy and Economics at UW Tacoma, co-authored a study that explores whether people will vote more with the addition of more ballot drop boxes, which is required by a new state law in Washington. The study —which Baird and her coauthors presented to the State Government, Elections, and IT Committee on October 27— compared voting behavior in 2015 to that in 2016, when the number of drop boxes increased from 10 to 43. The outcomes suggest that while there may be an increase in voter turnout with the addition of more boxes, it is not likely to be driven by typically low-turnout groups. The study is a product of Project Vote Washington, a team of five economists and political scientists—of which Baird is a member—that examines voting outcomes to inform Washington voting policy. In a recent HeraldNet article that discusses the study, Baird said, “What we know is drop boxes are incredibly popular among voters. We found the low voting groups did not seem to be as influenced by boxes.” A draft of the full study is available below.

Emily Williams Investigates Pharmaceutical Alcohol Use Disorder Treatments in VA Primary Care Clinics

Affiliate Emily Williams, Associate Professor of Health Services, co-authored a recent article that examines factors that pose challenges for or aid in prescribing medications for alcohol use disorders (AUD), and beliefs among providers of primary care depending on their willingness to prescribe these medications. For this qualitative study, published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, the authors interviewed 24 providers from five different Veterans Affairs clinics. Their findings indicate that lack of knowledge and experience, stigma around alcohol, and skepticism about using medications rather than addiction treatment are barriers to prescribing medications for AUD. On the other hand, support for prescribing AUD medications, training, and the presence of behavioral staff to aid in the follow-up process facilitated prescription. Moreover, outcomes suggest that depending on their willingness to prescribe AUD medications, primary care providers have divergent attitudes regarding their role in prescribing for AUD and the effectiveness of medications for treating AUD. The full study is available below.

Scott Allard Addresses Myth About Poverty in Cities and Suburbs

Affiliate Scott Allard was quoted in a recent Chicago Tribune article that addresses myths about housing-related issues, including gentrification, low-income housing, and poverty. In response to the misconception that poverty is greater in cities than it is in suburbs, Allard—Professor at the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance—contends that poverty has in fact been shifting to the latter. “The number of poor persons in suburban Chicago eclipsed the number in the City of Chicago in the last decade, and there are no signs of this trend reversing anytime soon. Seven of every ten suburban municipalities outside Chicago saw the number of poor residents at least double from 1990 to 2014,” he said. Allard addresses the issue of rising suburban poverty in greater detail in his book, Places in Need: The Changing Geography of Poverty, published in June. The full article is available below.