Senior / Research Fellow in Education/Social Inequality Research

About us

About IOE

IOE is UCL Faculty of Education and Society.

Founded in 1902, IOE has been shaping policy and helping government, organisations and individuals navigate a changing society for the last 120 years. We embrace collaboration and excellence to create a future that is inclusive and just, and have been ranked number one for education every year since 2014 in the QS World University Rankings by Subject.

The Centre for Longitudinal Studies is an ESRC Resource Centre. CLS has responsibility for and manages four of Britain's internationally renowned cohort studies:

• 1958 National Child Development Study (NCDS)
• 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70)
• Millennium Cohort Study (MCS)
• Next Steps (formerly the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England)

The cohort studies follow individuals throughout their lives. They involve multiple surveys, together with other specialised forms of data collection (for example physical measurements and biological samples), and linkages to administrative records. The information collected is broad, covering areas as diverse as education, employment, and income, family and parenting, physical and mental health, and social attitudes.

About the role

The purpose of the job is to work on a new UKRI-funded project led by Dr. Felix C. Tropf which uses big data from social and biological science to explain and predicting social and health inequalities. The research will entail analysing social and biological information from large-scale surveys and population registers to explain inequalities educational attainment and other socioeconomic measures.

The project will contribute to the methods development in Multi-Level/Hierarchical Modelling and the candidate with work closely with Statisticians and Data Science to codevelop and apply inference statistical and prediction models. Data sources will include, but is not limited to, population registers and various national and international surveys. The successful candidate will take a central role in the quantitative analyses and methods development, writing of the research papers and of their publication in leading journals, as well as playing a key role in dissemination.

This position is funded until 31st December 2026 in the first instance.

About you

You will have completed or be near-completion of a PhD in sociology, economics, psychology or related disciplines with focus on educational inequalities or social mobility, along with profound theoretical knowledge about the determinants of educational attainment

For appointment at grade 8 you will have substantial experience working either at post-doctoral level in the research areas noted above (in which case, appropriate academic publications should be demonstrated)

Your application form should address all the person specification points and should clearly demonstrate how your skills and experience meet each of the criteria.

It is important that the criteria are clearly numbered and that you provide a response to each one.