Post-Doctoral Associate

The Software and Societal Systems Department(S3D), in the School of Computer Science, at Carnegie Mellon University is looking for a Post-Doctoral Associate.

Qualitative position: will help design interview protocols and surveys, conduct interviews and deploy surveys, analyze the interview and survey data, write up and present results at conferences and workshops.
Quantitative position. The Post-Doc will help frame research questions and hypotheses, mine software repositories data, build statistical models, develop methods for linking scientific software to the scientific outut it helps to produce, and write up and present results at conferences and workshops.

Material for Advertisement: The Post-Doctoral Associate will join a funded research program that is a collaboration between Carnegie Mellon University and researchers at the eScience Institute at the University of Washington. We are performing a mixed-method study of the technical and scientific impact of professional software engineers joining teams of scientists. A qualitative thread of research will involve interviews of scientists and software engineers in approximately two dozen projects across four prestigious labs in US universities, as well as a survey of a much larger sample of scientists and software engineers. A quantitative thread will extract several hundred thousand projects with scientific software from a comprehensive data resource (World of Code), identify signatures of professional software engineers, and examine productivity and quality of code produced before and after their participation. We will also link the code to the scientific output, such as publications, produced with the software to investigate scientific impact.

The applicant should have general familiarity with software engineering and scientificd research. For the qualitatively focused position, the applicant must have a PhD in computer science, , psychology, sociology, communications, or a related field.

Experience interviewing, designing surveys, qualitative data analysis, and knowledge of statistics are highly desirable. For the quantitative position, the applicant must have a PhD in computer science, statistics, or related field. Experience with empirical studies of software artifacts and social network analysis are highly desirable.