Dear Colleague,

We have some exciting opportunities for postdocs at our new Applied Statistics Center at Columbia.  Please pass on this message to your best students who are getting their Ph.D. this year.  I'm especially interested in students with interests in social and environmental science and policy, with experience in Bayesian computation and ability to program in R and other languages.

This message is long because there are a lot of projects going on here.  Also, one of the positions--the Earth Institute postdoc--has a deadline of 1 Dec, so please pass this on right away.

What will the postdocs be doing?  First off, there are a number of interesting applied projects of mine (studies of social networks and political polarization, a project on more efficient modeling of laboratory assays, representation in small and large states, ...) along with corresponding methodological research projects (multilevel models with interactions, statistical graphics and model summaries, models for survey weighting and causal inference, ...).  Postdocs have the opportunity to work directly with me and my collaborators on these projects.

Along with this are several other projects at Columbia with which I am involved (arsenic in Bangladesh drinking water, maintenance of the Con Ed electricity network, and various projects in epidemiology, law, social work, and other fields).  These provide a postdoc with the opportunity to get deeply involved in applied projects with some supervision on my part, but with more independence on their part.

Institutionally, we are starting a new Applied Statistics Center, which has formal connections with epidemiology, social work, law, computer science, political science, engineering, statistics, and the Earth Institute, as well as informal connections with faculty in economics, sociology, business, and other units on campus.  The statistics postdocs will serve a vital role in bridging these disciplines, and I think it will be an exciting place for them--a great way to start off an academic or research career.

I hope you can encourage your very best Ph.D. graduates to apply for our positions.  There are several things they can apply for:

- Application for a postdoc at the Applied Statistics Center.  Applicants should email a c.v., research statement, copies of their papers, and three letters of recommendation.

- Application for a postdoc at the Earth Institute.  Instructions are here:  http://www.earth.columbia.edu/postdoc/
The deadline for applying is 1 Dec, so they should apply right away!  In addition to letters of recommendation, etc., this application requires a five-page statement of a research plan.  Applicants can feel free to contact me about how their research interests would fit into the Earth Institute.

- Application for an assistant professor position at the Statistics Department; see here:  http://www.stat.columbia.edu/sea.htm
These are non-tenure-track; however, they are actually great possibilities for a postdoc who is interested in teaching.  This could be good for Ph.D. graduates with interest in applied statistics, since there will be lots of opportunity for them to work on interesting projects and develop their research ideas.

Interested students can apply to one, two, or all three of these possibilities to make it more likely that some position can be put together for them.  Any applicants for the Earth Institute postdoc and the statistics Assistant Professorship should also contact me so that I can coordinate things.

Finally, the deadline for the Earth Institute postdoc is 1 Dec, so they should apply right away (and contact me if they have questions about the application process).

Yours,

Andrew


Andrew Gelman
Professor, Department of Statistics
Professor, Department of Political Science
Columbia University, New York