Post-doctoral Position in Health Geography

The Geography Department of University of Connecticut (UConn) is looking for a post-doctoral researcher to work on methodology development for the analysis and visualization of neighborhood and social network effects on drug use and HIV transmission. This is part of a multi-year NIH funded study looking to identify barriers to medication adherence, retention in care, and HIV treatment outcomes among drug users with HIV infection. The ultimate goal is to develop multilevel interventions to improve adherence to ART and HIV treatment outcomes.

We are looking for a candidate who is interested in addressing the following:
• Measuring and visualizing activity spaces
• Social network analysis and GIS
• Geographical Information Retrieval and Network Analysis from textual data
However, these are just starting points. It is expected that the candidate will dig in to the data and take the lead on formulating questions and identify opportunities to develop and apply new methods of analysis and visualization. There will be opportunities to work with several datasets so that novel methods can be tested on real data.

About you: You should have familiarity with health geography research in general and deep interest in developing methods (perhaps mixed methods) to address challenges when using georeferenced health data. Some pertinent challenges include visualization, scale of interaction, modeling, and data privacy. You are strong in GIS, geocoding large datasets, retrieving location data from text, distance calculations by various algorithms, and basic regression analysis. You also want to share your work - by writing papers and presenting your work at meetings. At the end of it all, you want your work to impact real life problems and not just remain a theoretical curiosity.
Required
• A Ph.D. in Geography or related fields (e.g., public health, social work)
• Programming skills - ideally in Python and R. If not, you should have experience with other programming and data analysis environments and would be willing to pick up Python and R.
• Strong communication skills (in written and spoken English).

About Us: We are a multi-institutional collaborative research group including faculty members from Geography, Psychology, and Center for Health Intervention and Prevention of UConn (https://www.chip.uconn.edu/) and Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS (CIRA) of Yale University (http://cira.yale.edu/), committed to research and development in all areas of social, behavioral, and structural factors of health behavior. The group, also including talented PhD students and post-doctoral researchers, provides an intellectually stimulating environment and is interested in a diverse range of topics ranging from methods, interventions, and translational work. Since we collaborate closely with Yale University CIRA, you will be exposed to research on a wide variety of public health studies including, interventions, clinical trials, mixed methods studies, and grant writing experiences.

Please send a cover letter, that specifically addresses why you are interested in this position and a CV (all PDF) to Debs Ghosh (debarchana.ghosh@uconn.edu).

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Debarchana (Debs) Ghosh
Assistant Professor, Geography
University of Connecticut
Email: debarchana.ghosh@uconn.edu
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