Research Analyst

About The Department

Successful cities are key to successful societies. Throughout history, cities have represented the vibrancy and ingenuity of humanity by uniting diverse populations and fostering innovation, ultimately enabling societies to flourish. At the Mansueto Institute, we are building on the proud tradition of urban scholarship at the University of Chicago, bringing together ideas and groups to advance research, convene events, and offer opportunities to students, faculty, and others.

We identify and support the best ideas when they are poised to have an impact, aiming to produce innovative solutions. That’s why we work with partners throughout the University of Chicago to discover promising research across disciplines and provide the support needed to launch these ideas and make a true difference in people’s lives.

Our work takes a variety of forms. This includes developing research and initiatives with partners across UChicago and beyond; outreach and collaborating to identify and advance the needs of community; analyzing and presenting data so it makes a meaningful impact on policy questions; bringing together a variety of stakeholders for events on critical issues, from affordable housing to the impact of climate change on cities; training University of Chicago students to better serve and lead the cities of the future through a variety of fellowship and research opportunities; and communicating our work to media, communities, policymakers, and the general public.

We work with various schools, departments, centers, institutes, and other units across campus and outside of the university to leverage our resources to turn urban scholarship into impact. At the University of Chicago, we aim to foster a vibrant urban ecosystem. Beyond our walls, we work with community partners, government, the private sector, and others on a variety of efforts to promote a successful urban future.

Job Summary

The Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation seeks a highly motivated Research Analyst to work closely with faculty, research assistants, and others at the University of Chicago. The person in this position will support our Local Data Journalism program. An example of past work in this program can be viewed here: https://ctastopwatch.miurban-dashboards.org/.

This role manages research projects and works under the supervision of our senior data scientist and the faculty director in partnership with collaborating journalists to analyze data, write summary reports, and assist with visualizations and on-line tool and dashboard development.

Responsibilities

• Cleans, transforms, merges, and matches between large and complex research and administrative datasets.
• Works with external partners/journalists and members of the research team to propose and implement analytical approaches to solving specific research questions.
• Builds statistical models for a variety of research projects.
• Prepares results for memos, presentations, and news articles.
• Performs a range of activities to facilitate the design of research projects and the publication of their results.
• Supervises data analyst fellows and student research assistants, helping direct their work.
• Writes statistical computer programs and reviews computer output for consistency and quality.
• Maintains technical and administrative support for a research project.
• Analyzes and maintains data and/or specimens. Conducts literature reviews. Assists with preparation of reports, manuscripts and other documents.
• Performs other related work as needed.

Education

Minimum Qualifications

Minimum requirements include a college or university degree in related field.

Work Experience

Minimum Qualifications

Minimum requirements include knowledge and skills developed through < 2 years of work experience in a related job discipline.

Certifications

N/A

Preferred Qualifications

Education

• Bachelor’s degree or higher.

Experience

• Minimum of one to two years of relevant technical work experience through education or prior employment.
• Drafting and delivering research results.
• Familiar with statistical analysis applied to GIS data.
• Working in journalism or in a newsroom and with FOIA requests.

Technical Skills Or Knowledge

• Computing and analysis experience with various datasets using standard industry software such as Python, Stata, and/or R.
• Fluency in data organization, manipulation and analysis.
• Knowledge of and ability to navigate Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and inquiries.

Preferred Competencies

• Understand and translate journalists’ data needs/goals into analytical requirements.
• Work well with journalists, faculty and researchers.
• Identify and gain expertise in appropriate new methods, technologies and/or software tools.
• Understanding and interest in the journalistic process and effective ways to use data to tell compelling stories.
• Strong analytical skills and problem-solving ability.
• Perform at a high level as part of an interactive multi-disciplinary team including faculty, students and other researchers while demonstrating self-initiative to achieve project’s goals.
• A passion for knowing the upcoming state of the art in urban and geospatial data, and associated analysis and visualization.

Application Documents

• Resume/CV (required)
• Cover Letter (required)
• 3 References Contact Information (required)
• Analytical Writing Sample, a research paper or report written for a course or work assignment acceptable (required)
• Brief Technical Assessment (required) using a dataset of your choice which is publicly available, present two simple and quick facts about your chosen dataset in a document which includes your code. Try to spend at most 30 minutes on this assessment. You are encouraged to select whichever programming language and document type you like and to briefly contextualize your chosen dataset with an introduction. The purpose of this assessment is to see how you organize your work at its initial stages. We are not looking for you to come up with complicated insights into the dataset or create a final report with great formatting. Facts could be as simple as a single sentence which describes counts of how often something happens. This assessment will be evaluated on the cohesiveness, clarity, and conciseness of your work, not its complexity (required)

When applying, the document(s) MUST be uploaded via the My Experience page, in the section titled Application Documents of the application.

Key skills/competency

• Data Analysis
• Statistical Modeling
• GIS Data
• Python
• R Programming
• Stata
• Journalism Collaboration
• FOIA Requests
• Report Writing
• Data Visualization