Research Associate - Quantitative Analysis (SFRD)
Overview
The Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) is an independent, non-profit, federally-funded research and development center that provides objective analyses to the Department of Defense and other federal government agencies. Researchers in IDA’s Human Capital Group (HCG) support senior defense leaders by applying knowledge and methods from economics, statistics, data science, psychology, and sociology to a broad range of national security policy issues. As needed, we apply proven tools to new problems and data, develop new models, and generate new theory.
Recent examples of our work:
- Training machine learning models to predict individual’s career events using a rich set of administrative personnel records
- Estimating causal effects of staffing levels and characteristics on mission effectiveness
- Designing a personnel retention experiment impacting thousands of service members
- Designing a trial of alcohol market interventions for use on military bases to learn whether such intervention can prevent harmful behaviors associated with alcohol misuse
- Architecting a collaborative data-hosting analytic platform to facilitate timely and secure analysis of sensitive Department of Defense information assets across a diverse community of users
- Exploring alternative organizational structures and delivery methods for educating and training military medical personnel, in order to reduce costs and streamline management
- Identifying opportunities to transfer positions among active and reserve military personnel, federal civilians, and contractors in order to reduce costs and concentrate military personnel in more operational (vs. administrative) positions
HCG researchers work on a variety of projects. For each project, researchers are responsible for choosing and using the right tool, whether a familiar standby or a cutting-edge technique. When the right tool is new to us, we learn it. When the right tool does not yet exist, we create it (see https://github.com/IDA-HumanCapital/fife). We take pride in the high caliber and timeliness of our analyses, our independent thinking, and our objective results. We value strong teamwork and communication skills. Individuals who have served as RAs at IDA have gone on to PhD studies, entered government service, or launched successful careers in industry.
Responsibilities
- Directly contribute to IDA research efforts as members of research teams led by IDA Research Staff Members
- Perform information gathering, data cleaning and manipulation, statistical and econometric analysis, and drafting of reports and presentations
- Communicate clearly and contribute effectively to solving problems on a team
- Adapt to a wide range of complex research questions
- Exercise independent judgment, conscientiousness, and creativity
- Occasionally travel with research teams to U.S. government or U.S. security partner field locations
Qualifications
• Bachelor’s degree or higher in economics, statistics, operations research, mathematics, physics, computer science, data science, or related disciplines with a strong foundation in statistics and/or applied mathematics. Individuals with a doctoral degree will not be considered for this opportunity, and are encouraged to apply for other positions at IDA
• Experience with programming languages or statistical software used in research (e.g., Python, R, Julia, Stata, MATLAB, C, Java, etc.)
• Astute attention to detail
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills