Postdoctoral Research Associate in Sociology

The Department The Department of Sociology was established in 1964 initially as a Department of Social Theory and Institutions. The Department delivers undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in Sociology, Criminology and Social Work and supports the delivery of a faculty research methods programme as part of the collaborative NINEDTP. The Department's research strategy is built around four themes: Communities and Social Justice, Health and Social Theory, Higher Education and Social Inequality, and Violence and Abuse. The Role Applications are invited for a Postdoctoral Research Associate in computational social science. This position requires strong programming and quantitative skills with an interest in social science. The successful applicant will be working in a small team funded by the MRC to develop algorithms to generate synthetic social networks for simulation projects. The principal investigator for the project is Simulations have been used throughout the COVID-19 epidemic to adjust social distancing measures in a careful balance between hospital capacity and the economic impact of restricting activities. Simulations are able to guide policy because they can combine theoretical processes with current data to construct justified stories about plausible futures.

Big data initiatives have made it relatively straightforward to include schools, transport and other infrastructure into these simulations. Similarly, census data can be used to construct synthetic households with simulated people who go to work or school or leisure activities. What is missing, however, is similar resolution data about social networks. This project will develop methods to build synthetic social networks that reproduce structural properties that we know are important in real social networks, like mutual friends.

The successful applicant will be expected to: conceive, design and implement network modelling algorithms under supervision; collaborate effectively with other researchers on the project and more broadly; communicate research findings to other researchers, through conference and journal publications.