Professors Stefanie DeLuca and Nicholas Papageorge are accepting applications for Pre-Doctoral Research Fellows (Research Assistant) at the Poverty and Inequality Research Lab (PIRL) at Johns Hopkins University.

Previous pre-doctoral fellows have worked on research projects on topics including the trajectories of community college students, housing policies to increase neighborhood quality, the responses of high-achieving low-income students to financial aid, and race trends in economic mobility. They have done so using multiple social scientific methods, often in conjunction, including qualitative data collection and analysis via semi-structured interviews, structural micro-econometric modeling and estimation, and statistical analysis of large-scale administrative data, among other approaches.

The fellowship will include a variety of tasks that provide preparation for graduate school, such as analyzing data, developing statistical models, creating presentations, and editing research papers. The position(s) will begin in the summer or fall of 2025 and could last up to 2 years. Pre-doctoral Research Fellows will be integrated into at least one home department (Economics or Sociology).

Specific Duties & Responsibilities

• Closely collaborate with Professors DeLuca and Papageorge on cross-disciplinary, methodologically broad, policy-relevant, empirical social scientific research related primarily to poverty, inequality, race, education, labor and housing. For recent examples of their work, see https://otheramerica.org/ and https://nicholaswpapageorge.com/

• Conduct fieldwork and analyze data

• Participate in weekly research group meetings

• Prepare mandatory reports and documents/protocols

• Conduct literature searches

• Attend seminars and other departmental events

• Perform miscellaneous related duties as assigned

Special Knowledge, Skills, & Abilities

• Experience in basic descriptive or intermediate social science analysis and software is expected.

• Excellent written and oral skills and the ability to communicate effectively are essential as well as strong organizational, administrative, project management, and problem-solving skills.

• Ability to manage and track large amounts of sensitive and diverse data, ability to balance multitude of ongoing competing deadlines, and the ability to work independently and with others.

• Bachelor's Degree in related discipline.
• Additional related experience may substitute for required education, to the extent permitted by the JHU equivalency formula.

• Master’s (or equivalent) preferred.

• Interest in pursuing a Ph.D. in Economics, Sociology or Public Policy.

• Interests in either Economics (especially: applied microeconomics, structural methods and decision-making) or Sociology (especially: urban sociology, sociology of education, social stratification) or both (preferred).

• A strong quantitative background, experience with programming (ideally in statistical programming languages) and/or working with micro-level data and/or a strong background conducting qualitative research, including experience with in-depth interviews, ethnographic observation and analytic software (such as MAXQDA, NVivo or Atlas.ti).

Classified Title: Research Assistant 
Role/Level/Range: ACRO40/E/03/CD  
Starting Salary Range: $17.20 - $30.30 HRLY (Commensurate with experience) 
Employee group: Full Time 
Schedule: Monday - Friday / 8:30 - 5:00 
Exempt Status: Non-Exempt 
Location: Homewood Campus 
Department name: ​​​​​​​Sociology 
Personnel area: School of Arts & Sciences