A major societal shift to clean energy comes with an analogous redistribution of fossil fuel workers to new opportunities. How can we achieve this transition justly? Solutions require insights into social, economic, and career limitations that limit today's fossil fuel workers. To address these multi-disciplinary questions, the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA) at the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) has an opening for a 2-year post-doctoral associate position in the Data Analytics of Labor Markets beginning in September 2024. 

The project investigates the labor market opportunities and barriers in the transition to more diversified economies with a focus on a Just Transition for fossil fuel workers to other employment opportunities. Knowledge from this project will inform policies that support a Just Transition. The post-doctoral associate will analyze workers' skills using several large public and proprietary databases, using tools from computational social science and social sciences. The applicant should be near the completion of their Ph.D. in Computational Social Sciences, Economics, Political Science, Sociology, Public Policy, or related fields and comfortable with languages such as Python and/or R. The candidate must complete their Ph.D. prior to the commencement of this post-doc associate position.

The postdoc will be working with the interdisciplinary team led by Prof. Shanti Gamper-Rabindran (GSPIA, Economics, Law, Pitt), Prof. Michael Aklin (College of Management, EPFL – Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne) and Prof. Morgan R. Frank (Department of Informatics and Networked Systems, School of Computing and Information, Pitt). The team publishes evidence-based research to inform public policies to support workers' transition within more diversified economies. 

We are committed to working with the post-doc and our students to conduct research that will be published in well-regarded journals and that will inform public policy. We envision that the post-doc will not only pursue our plan of research, but also take the lead in related research directions and gain experience in jointly planning new research directions and in jointly pursuing research funding opportunities. The team's collaborative nature and its track record of securing funding and producing interdisciplinary publications that provide guidance on public policy provides a positive environment for a post-doc to further hone their skills for pursuing academic or/and policy work.

The annual salary for this role will be in the $58,000-$60,000 range.

Faculty members' related research in the intersection of labor markets, energy and the environment can be viewed at:

• https//shanti1.weebly.com
• https://sites.pitt.edu/~mrfrank/ 
• https://www.epfl.ch/labs/pasu/

To apply, please upload the following materials to University of Pittsburgh Talent Center: (1) a cover letter detailing your research experience on the analysis of labor skills and your use of computational analysis or/and econometrics to examine labor skills; (2) CV including the link to your professional website or google scholar page (if applicable); (3) two research papers. including at least one for which you are the lead author; (4) Name, position and email of your three letter writers. 

Please request your referees to kindly send their confidential letters of recommendation to Prof. Gamper-Rabindran ([email protected]) 

To guarantee full consideration, your application should be submitted by November 27, 2023, but we will continue to review applications until the position is filled.