Northwestern University

Position Title/Short Description

Full Text of JOE Listing:

As a Senior Computational Research Consultant (SCRC), you will draw on a broad set of technological, creative, and problem-solving skills in order to accelerate and facilitate ambitious academic research at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. You will strengthen the School’s capabilities in our focus areas of: novel data collection, text manipulation, large scale data analysis, and computational social science. You will work closely with our faculty, understand their research challenges, and then design and implement creative solutions that help them move beyond obstacles in their research work. For example, you might: write web scraping or crowd sourcing programs to collect a unique dataset; use machine learning algorithms to extract information from text documents; take advantage of cluster computing to accelerate an analysis; or, prototype “Big Data” systems to analyze very large datasets.

You will join a dedicated, growing Research Support team at Kellogg. Clients include Kellogg faculty members and doctoral students. As SCRC, you will typically engage multiple clients at a time, and these engagements may last from a few days to several weeks. Expect to work with bright minds on challenging problems, evaluate emerging technologies, and apply new techniques to solve research problems. As research methods evolve, so will your role.

Specific Responsibilities:
•Listen critically and effectively in order to understand our faculty’s research needs.
•Conceive, design, prototype, and implement innovative solutions around the collection, transformation, analysis, and visualization of social science research data.
•Encourage our researchers to adopt innovative new technological tools and methods by developing training materials, guides, and other resources.
•Provide training and consulting for using standard software and tools.
•Create and update documentation on resources, tools and data management practices.

Minimum Qualifications:
•Advanced degree (M.A. or M.S. minimum, Ph.D preferred) with a research component in any quantitative field.
•Experience using at least two of these standard statistical software packages: Matlab, R, Python, SAS, and/or STATA.
•Experience with Unix/Linux, including scripting.
•Strong understanding of applied statistics methods used in thesocial sciences.
•Ability to organize and document datasets intelligently, and to examine data critically for integrity.
•Ability to work independently and manage time effectively in an environment with unpredictable work-flows.
•Outstanding communication skills.
•Commitment to continual learning and development.

Preferred Qualifications:
•Experience writing regular expressions or NLP algorithms to extract information from unstructured data sources.
•Working familiarity with version control tools such as git.
•Understanding of database design concepts and tuning databases for performance.