[Air-L] Deadline approaching: PhD position (4 years) and Postdoc (2 years) on Population Scale Social Network Analysis

[Eelke Heemskerk]

(apologies for multiple postings)
Dear all,

This is a gentle one-time reminder that the application deadline for the PhD and postdoc position on Population-Scale Social Network Analysis is in one week from now, so on December 3.

Full-time Postdoc (2 years) in Computational Social Science at the University of Amsterdam
https://www.uva.nl/en/content/vacancies/2020/11/20-691-postdoctoral-researcher-in-computational-social-science.html

Full-time PhD Candidate (4 years) in Computational Social Science at the University of Amsterdam
https://www.uva.nl/en/content/vacancies/2020/11/20-690-phd-candidate-in-computational-social-science.html

Looking forward to your (student's) applications!
Eelke and Frank

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POPNET platform on Population Scale Social Network Analysis

Are you a passionate and committed young researcher and well versed in cutting-edge computational social science approaches? Would you like to be involved in frontier research on large-scale network analysis and official register data and work with highly qualified researchers in an interdisciplinary academic environment? Effective immediately, we are seeking a PhD candidate and Postdoc on Population Scale Network Analysis. You will be part of the POPNET platform, and your position is hosted by the University of Amsterdam.

As an ideal candidate for this position, you find yourself at home in the international computational social science research community. You have a well-developed skillset in scientific programming and an affinity with network analysis in particular. You are able to work with very large data and have the creativity and curiosity to develop new network measures and statistics. You are keenly aware of the ethical issues related to using large scale social register data and want to contribute to a responsible scholarly practice on big data analytics. You may have a disciplinary background in either social sciences, humanities or computational sciences, but you strongly believe in interdisciplinary collaboration. You are a creative team player who does not shy back from entering new scholarly terrain. You have creativity, precision, and perseverance. You do not believe universities should be ivory towers but rather sites for independent thought and academic progress, working together with stakeholders inside and outside academia. You take initiative, have excellent communication skills, and you are well able to work in a team as well as independently. You like to collaborate both with academics and non-experts and you can present complex statistical models to both groups in a bespoke manner. You care more about (social) impact of your work than impact factors, but because you are ambitious you always aim for the top.

The project is a collaboration of the University of Amsterdam (UvA), Leiden University (UL) and Statistics Netherlands (CBS). The researcher will work in an interdisciplinary social data science environment, bringing together computer science with the social sciences and humanities.

POPNET-SSH is a novel digital infrastructure and research community with the aim of unlocking longitudinal social network data on the entire population of the Netherlands for academic research purposes. A first-of-a-kind research infrastructure tailored in terms of hard- and software specifically for large-scale social network analysis will be developed. The available data includes the complete social network (at population-scale) of the 17 million inhabitants of Netherlands, including all family, neighborhood, school and work relations, as well as demographic information. From this, actionable insights into key issues including segregation, substantive social change, and UN sustainable development goals such as reducing inequality can be obtained.
We invite candidates to think about what they would want to investigate using this data, and elaborate on this in their motivation letter.

Do you recognize yourself? Do you want to be involved in frontier computational social science research? Are you thrilled by the opportunity to work in a truly interdisciplinary research environment? Find the full vacancy text and details on how to apply at the URLs below.

Full-time Postdoc (2 years) in Computational Social Science at the University of Amsterdam
https://www.uva.nl/en/content/vacancies/2020/11/20-691-postdoctoral-researcher-in-computational-social-science.html

Full-time PhD Candidate (4 years) in Computational Social Science at the University of Amsterdam
https://www.uva.nl/en/content/vacancies/2020/11/20-690-phd-candidate-in-computational-social-science.html
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