Stanford University

Position Title/Short Description

Full Text of JOE Listing:

The Golub Capital Social Impact Lab has a 2-year post-doctoral fellow opening, working with Professor Susan Athey and other faculty affiliates. The lab’s research is focused on improving the effectiveness of social impact organizations, particularly in the domains of education, charitable giving, health, government services, worker training, and financial health.

The ideal candidate will have conducted behavioral/experimental research and have experience working with external partners on field experiments. Excellent candidates with other specialities or backgrounds related to the lab’s work will also be considered.

The position involves:

-developing and working on research projects using advanced experimental design and other causal inference techniques
-serving as project manager and collaborator on research projects, as a coauthor on some projects and as an assisting researcher on others
-interfacing with industry partners
-supervising RAs at various levels of seniority
-As the lab is increasing research efforts in the area of charitable giving, the postdoctoral fellow is likely to be involved in research projects in the domain area.

The ideal candidate is either preparing for an academic position in a field closely aligned with the lab, for which collaboration on the lab’s projects would serve as strong preparation, or an industry position, ie., a technology company.

Depending on the fellow’s skills and interests, the fellowship will allow the opportunity to: create novel experimental designs, including adaptive and dynamic treatment regimes, bandits, and contextual bandits; run experiments in collaboration with technology firms or on tech firm platforms; use and develop cutting edge methodology for working with large data sets, including tools of machine learning and causal inference; develop coding expertise for publicly released software; and/or develop expertise in managing large-scale empirical projects with large code bases written by teams.

The strongest applicants will have a variety of skills and preparation, and a strong desire to rapidly obtain any skills and experience that are lacking. Desirable skills and experience include:

-PhD in economics, business or management disciplines, statistics, decision sciences, political science, psychology, marketing, experimental philosophy, or any other relevant scientific discipline, with expertise relevant to at least some of the problems and methods described above
-Excellent coding skills and experience with statistical software in multiple languages eg. R.
-Experience with econometrics, modeling and/or programming
-Experience with large datasets
-Experience with designing, implementing and analyzing experiments
-Experience with Github or similar tools for collaboration and version control
-Experience in interdisciplinary research, working in teams and managing RAs