Research Data Analyst

The Research Data Analyst will be part of a growing team at the USC EdPolicy Hub at the USC Rossier School of Education. The “Hub” collaborates with Southern California schools, education systems, and community colleges to co-design and conduct relevant research. Results will help partners navigate challenges and improve outcomes and equity for students across the region through research and evidence.

In pursuit of this end, the Hub both conducts cutting-edge research on critical topics for the field and develops research networks that can answer questions for and better support education leaders throughout the region. The Research Data Analyst will be a critical part of our team, performing critical data analysis on large education data sets to help education leaders in the region learn what’s working and what’s not.

We are seeking a detail-oriented Research Data Analyst to work with across multiple school districts and research projects to clean and analyze administrative data for Hub research and consulting projects. 

Principal duties and responsibilities:
The Research Data Analyst will typically work across several projects and/or research partners in close collaboration with faculty and senior researchers at USC and (sometimes) other institutions.  Specific responsibilities include:

Cleaning and performing quality checks on administrative and research data provided by research partners

Write SQL queries or API calls to pull variables from data stored in a structured format

Automating repeated, routine procedures, such as file intake, conversion, inspection, and summarization with extensible scripts that can be deployed across different projects

Designing and maintaining pipelines to automate reports from output generated by a statistical program, such as R or Stata

Managing and analyzing large administrative datasets, including time-series and panel data spanning multiple school years, schools, and districts

Understanding and executing sophisticated analyses on large data sets as guided by senior researchers on relevant projects

Developing and managing quantitative workflows that are transparent, logically organized, and clearly documented to facilitate sharing and reproducibility

Participating and contributing to team meetings on assigned projects

Authoring sections of Hub produced research reports and academic papers

Presenting results from Hub projects to research partners in the field and at academic and practitioner conferences

Basic Qualifications:

Master’s degree in a relevant quantitative social science field required (e.g., public policy, political science, economics, education policy, social science, statistics, or a related field). Two years of related work experience required.  Substantial experience programming in Stata or R. Demonstrated leadership in developing new ideas and ability to publish in appropriate academic and practitioner outlets.  Demonstrated independent thinking and leadership in scholarly writing.

Additional Qualifications:

Ph.D. preferred.

Previous experience working with large data sets – ideally longitudinal, student-level administrative data from education agencies.

Experience working on multi-functional research teams.

Familiarity with dynamic document publishing tools in Stata or R that integrate programming code, statistical output, and narrative text (e.g., Quarto, R Markdown, Jupyter, or LaTeX)

Familiarity with versioning software tools for code development, such as Git or other bespoke tools to enforce version control

This position's annual base salary range is $88,000-$95,000. When extending an offer of employment, the University of Southern California considers factors such as (but not limited to) the scope and responsibilities of the position, the candidate’s work experience, education/training, key skills, internal peer equity, federal, state and local laws, contractual stipulations, grant funding, as well as external market and organizational considerations.

Candidates must submit a cover letter, resume and transcript (official or unofficial) as a single PDF document. Any applicant wishing to be considered for this position must indicate that they meet all of the basic requirements in either the cover letter or resume. Candidates selected for additional screening and interviews will be required to provide R or Stata programming scripts for review by members of the hiring committee.

Applications should be submitted via usccarreers.usc.edu and should include the following:

This position is a term appointment for one year from the date of hire, with a strong possibility of continuation.

Minimum Education: Master's degree Addtional Education Requirements Combined experience/education as substitute for minimum education Minimum Experience: 2 years Minimum Skills: Statistics, econometrics and/or biostatistics experience. Experience with relevant data analysis programs (e.g., R, Python, SAS, SPSS). Excellent written and oral communications skills. Proven analytical and problem-solving skills. Preferred Experience: 3 years