Postdoctoral Associate – Political Science.

Working at MIT offers opportunities, an environment, a culture – and benefits – that just aren’t found together anywhere else. If you’re curious, motivated, want to be part of a unique community, and help shape the future – then take a look at this opportunity.

Information on MIT’s COVID-19 vaccination requirement can be found at the bottom of this posting.

POSTDOCTORAL ASSOCIATE, Political Science, to join a computational social science research project–LobbyView –with Professor In Song Kim.  Will work with Professor Kim to examine special interest group politics in the U.S., using computational methods.  Responsibilities include analyzing lobbying and campaign donation data; and developing/maintaining a large-scale money in politics SQL database. The team is currently developing novel computational methods for social science research such as community detection and graphical neural network methods to infer political networks, and NLP methods to investigate congressional bill writing and entity disambiguation. The position offers an opportunity to engage in independent research projects according to your research interests/background.

Job Requirements
REQUIRED:  Ph.D. (or an anticipated Ph.D. completion by May 2022) in and research experience with computer science, computational social science, political science, or other related field; ability to work independently with general supervision and as part of a team; experience working with remote servers (Linux CLI, AWS); good Python/Git development skills; and familiarity with SQL.  PREFERRED:  experience with data-driven social sciences, experience with large-scale data handling, solid knowledge of SQL and relational database modeling, and knowledge of Postgres/NodeJS/GraphQL/React/D3.  Job #20422

This project is supported by the National Science Foundation. Please indicate your earliest preferred start date in your cover letter.

This is a one-year term appointment with the possibility of renewal based on funding and performance.

11/12/21