Senior Research Officer

The University of Essex is one of the leading universities in Europe for social science research: the results of the 2021 Research Excellence Framework (REF) put it in the top 5 in the UK for social science. The Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER) is a flagship department within the University of Essex and is internationally recognised as a centre of excellence and expertise in quantitative social science and research methodologies.

ISER houses the ESRC-funded Research Centre on Micro-Social Change (MiSoC). MiSoC is one of the longest running ESRC-funded research centres in the UK. Since its inception, MiSoC’s focus has been on analysing the behaviour and outcomes of individuals and families and how they are shaped by policy and social and economic trends. Its research programme is wide ranging and multi-disciplinary, although a key unifying theme is the use of advanced quantitative methods, usually applied to micro-data on individuals. MiSoC’s current 2024-27 research programme is described at the following link.

MiSoC’s researchers are not only based in ISER, but also in the Department of Sociology and Criminology, the Department of Economics, and the Institute for Analytics and Data Science (IADS) at the University of Essex. The Project Lead and Director of MiSoC is Professor Emilia Del Bono.

Duties of the Role

ISER is seeking to appoint a Senior Research Officer who can contribute to the MiSoC research programme working mainly under the direction of Professor Paul Clarke and Dr Spyros Samothrakis to develop machine learning methods for use in social science research.

The person appointed will help to produce research outputs for publication and disseminate the result of research and scholarship through appropriate activities inside and outside academia, such as participating in relevant national and international conferences and engagement events.

Specifically, the person appointed will help scope literature, prepare data and conduct quantitative analysis on specific topics as directed by Professor Clarke and Dr Samothrakis. You will have the opportunity to co-author papers and contribute to the development of the MiSoC research agenda.

A full list of duties and responsibilities can be found within the job pack.

Qualifications and Skills

Applicants should possess a relevant doctoral level degree in computer science (or be close to completion of PhD) or equivalent professional experience or practice.

You should have experience in programming and application of machine learning techniques such as doubly debiased machine learning, LASSO, quasi-oracle estimation, and targeted maximum likelihood. You should also be able to demonstrate good knowledge of the literature on causal effect estimation from computer science, statistics and econometrics.

A full list of applicant requirements can be found under the Person Specification section within the job pack.

This is a fixed-term research post for 24 months in line with the MiSoC grant funding. There are no teaching duties associated with this post.

Please use the 'Apply' button to read further information about this role including the full job description and person specification which outlines the full duties, skills, qualifications and experience needed for this role. You will also find details of how to make your application here. Our website http://www.essex.ac.uk contains more information about the University of Essex. If you have a disability and would like information in a different format, please email resourcing@essex.ac.uk. 

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