Come Post-Doc with Me!

Attention conservation notice: Soliciting applications for a limited-time research job in an arcane field you neither understand nor care about, which will at once require specialized skills and pay much less than those skills command in industry.

I am, for the first time, hiring a post-doc:

The Department of Statistics and Data Science at Carnegie Mellon University invites applicants for a two-year post-doctoral fellowship in simulation-based inference. The fellow will work with Prof. Cosma Shalizi of the department on developing theory, algorithms and applications of random feature methods in simulation-based inference, with a particular emphasis on social-scientific problems connected to the work of CMU's Institute for Complex Social Dynamics. Apart from by the supervisor, the fellow will also be mentored by other faculty in the department and the ICSD, depending on their interests and secondary projects, and will get individualized training in both technical and non-technical professional skills.

Successful applicants will have completed a Ph.D. in Statistics, or a related quantitative discipline, by September 2025, and ideally have a strong background in non-convex and stochastic optimization and/or Monte Carlo methods, and good programming and communication skills. Prior familiarity with simulation-based inference, social network models and agent-based modeling will be helpful, but not necessary.

Basically, I need someone who is much better than I am at stochastic optimization to help out with the matching-random-features idea. But I hope my post-doc will come up with other things to do, unrelated to their ostensible project (God knows I did), and I promise not to put my name on anything unless I actually contribute. If you don't have a conventional background in statistics, well, I'm open to that, for obvious reasons.

Beyond that, the stats. department is a genuinely great and supportive place to work, I hope for fabulous things from ICSD, and CMU has a whole has both a remarkable number of people doing interesting work and remarkably low barriers between departments; Pittsburgh is a nice and still-affordable place to live. Apply, by 15 December!

--- If I have sold you on being a post-doc here, but not on my project or on me, may I interest you in working on social networks dynamics with my esteemed colleague Nynke Niezink?

(The post-doc ad is official, but this blog post is just me, etc., etc.)

Self-Centered