Director, Social Science Research Institute at Duke University

For over 20 years, Duke’s Social Science Research Institute (SSRI) has brought together researchers with interests in problems that span the social and behavioral sciences, and often connect with the humanities and natural sciences. SSRI promotes multidisciplinary collaboration among such scholars as they work on pressing social issues that are challenging to address fully from within any given discipline. Over the course of SSRI’s history at Duke, it has played an important role in facilitating broad engagement with methods of quantitative research, overseen a collection of important centers and institutes, and has become increasingly focused on issues related to equity. Under its next Director, SSRI will build on this impressive foundation, with a thematic focus on social equity.

As its next Director, SSRI seeks a broadly accomplished and impactful scholar with a fundamental interest in supporting research that describes the contours of social inequities; explores the processes through which social inequities come to be, persist, grow, and shrink; and dispassionately assesses the efficacy of policies that seek to address social inequities. While the Director’s own intellectual engagement could be in the areas of race and ethnicity, social class, gender and sexuality, and/or geographic disparities, candidates whose work focuses on domains ranging from housing, consumer protection, and education to business, government, the environment, criminal justice, and healthcare will also be considered; the goal of this newly articulated thematic focus is to ensure substantive engagement between SSRI and the breadth of social science inquiry across Duke.

Ideal candidates will have many of the following experiences and qualities:
 

• Breadth as an interdisciplinary researcher, with a level of scholarly achievement commensurate with a senior tenured faculty appointment at Duke and/or an intellectual profile and record of impact in policy development outside of academia.
• Demonstrated appreciation for the quantitative and interpretive social sciences, with a record of collaborating and engaging across disciplinary perspectives.
• The ability to collaborate, convene, and connect across the breadth of Duke.
• An entrepreneurial spirit, with the ability to lead through influence, navigate ambiguity, and exercise operational and financial acumen.
• The capacity to effectively communicate SSRI’s mission and focus to a broad range of stakeholder constituencies.
• Prior success in an administrative leadership role, ideally within a research-intensive context, with attention to the challenges and opportunities associated with project-based interdisciplinary education.  

The Duke SSRI Search Committee is eager to receive input that will help it build a diverse pool of talented individuals. To that end, the Search Committee welcomes your comments, inquiries, applications, and nominations, which may be submitted via e-mail with supporting materials to: DukeSSRI@SpencerStuart.com.