Tenure-Track Opening in Computational Social Science at CMU (a.k.a. Call to Pittsburgh, 2024 edition)

Attention conservation notice: Advertising an academic position in fields you don't work in, in a place you don't want to live, paying much less than the required skills can get from private industry.

We have a tenure-track opening at the intersection of statistics and complex social systems, a.k.a. computational social science:

The Department of Statistics and Data Science at Carnegie Mellon University invites applications for a tenure track position in Computational Social Science at the rank of Assistant Professor starting in Fall 2025. This position will be affiliated with the Institute for Complex Social Dynamics.

The Department seeks candidates in the areas of social science statistics and data science, as well as related interdisciplinary fields. Potential areas of interest include network science, social simulation, data science for social good, simulation-based inference, cultural evolution, using large text and image corpora as data, and data privacy. Candidates with other research interests related to the work of both the Department and the Institute are also highly encouraged to apply.

The Institute for Complex Social Dynamics brings together scholars at Carnegie Mellon University who develop and apply mathematical and computational models to study large-scale complex social phenomena. The core members of the Institute are based in the Departments of Statistics and Data Science, Social and Decision Sciences, and Philosophy. Interests of the Institute include studies of the emergence of social behavior, the spread of misinformation, social inequality, and societal resilience.

As tenure-track faculty, the successful candidate will be expected to develop an independent research agenda, leading to publications in leading journals in both statistics and in suitable social-scientific venues; to teach courses in the department at both the undergraduate and graduate level; to supervise Ph.D. dissertations; to obtain grants; and in general to build a national reputation for their scholarship. The candidate will join the ICSD as a Core Member, and help shape the future of the Institute.

CMU's statistics department is unusually welcoming to those without traditional disciplinary backgrounds in statistics (after all, I'm here!), and that goes double for this position. If this sounds interesting, then apply by December 15th. (I'm late in posting this.) If this sounds like it would be interesting to your doctoral students / post-docs / other proteges, then encourage them to apply.

(If you'd like to join the statistics department, but are not interested in complex social dynamics what's wrong with you? we have another tenure track opening, where I'm not on the hiring committee.)

Kith and Kin; Enigmas of Chance