Postdoctoral Researcher

The George Washington University Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics (IDDP) seeks exceptional candidates for a full-time, academic research position at the rank of post-doctoral fellow. IDDP is a multidisciplinary research initiative intended to strengthen democratic dialog and institutions through research and engagement with policymakers, journalists, and the public. The position is for a one-year term.

The postdoctoral associate will work closely with Professor Catie Bailard, who leads the Meaningful Open Source Indicators (MOSI) cluster. MOSI combines the subject-area and technical expertise of researchers working across a wide range of disciplines—including engineers, data scientists, computer scientists, computational social scientists, and traditional social scientists—to investigate the use of digital technologies to disseminate, promote, and orchestrate deleterious online content and behavior. The candidates will work on topics related to digital harms and the threat they pose to democratic societies. Candidates would be technically capable researchers who are also interested in asking bold, new questions with data. This position is located at GW’s Foggy Bottom campus in Washington, DC, and will report to Dr. Rebekah Tromble.

This position is primarily a temporary/training position in which the candidate would play a substantive role in planning and conducting research by using quantitative and qualitative methods to collect, analyze and report on data from digital and online sources. In collaboration with the Principal Investigators, this role will participate in the planning of independent research, will analyze and interpret data, will publish results, will represent the university at conferences and meetings, and may develop new theories and methodologies. Extensive professional experience using R, Python or similar tools are a key requirement for the position, and successful candidates should show potential to excel in tasks related to data collection, network analysis, text-as-data, and natural language processing at very large scale. This position may also help the Principal Investigators to lead and direct the work of research assistants and other staff. This role performs work under the supervision of experienced researchers.