positions at HU

[Gary King]

We'd like to fill these positions with with lots of connectionists!
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Visiting Faculty, Post-doctoral, and Pre-doctoral Positions at Harvard

A major new initiative, "Military Conflict as a Public Health
Problem," will commence at Harvard University beginning in the
2000-2001 academic year.  This project will support political
scientists, statistical methodologists, and public health scholars
interested in pursing their own work or joint work related to this
project.  We are offering research positions for faculty, post-docs,
and graduate students (including salary, office space, and computer
access; there are no teaching or administrative duties) for those
interested in:

- forecasting and explaining international conflict and civil wars

- describing or explaining the direct and indirect public health
  consequences of military conflict
  
- utilizing variables that are usually used to explain or forecast
  conflict to study the more ultimate dependent variable of human
  misery (e.g., political scientists have found that democracies do
  not fight each other as often as other types of countries, but they
  have not studied in this way the ultimate consequences of democracy
  for human well-being.)
  
- developing statistical methods for analyzing these data -- such as
  neural network models, CART, spatial statistics, data mining,
  hierarchical Bayesian models for numerous short time series or
  multiple cross-sections, models for complex dependence structures
  such as analyzing the presence of war or other variables in pairs of
  countries, forecasting models, statistical pattern recognition,
  visualization in large data sets, etc.
  
- conducting research on human security, expanding the notion of
  military security to include other aspects of human well-being.
  
- analyzing the best data in existence on global mortality and
  morbidity (by country, age, sex, and cause), military conflict (both
  international and civil), and thousands of explanatory variables
  corresponding to known or suspected predictors of each, at every
  level of aggregation available.  Participants will have unrestricted
  access to these data.

- other related topics.

A key motivation for this project is to forge new alliances across
disciplines, and so we do not expect applicants to be familiar with
military conflict AND new statistical approaches AND public health
research; expert knowledge in one of these fields and an interest in
learning about or contributing to one of the others is sufficient.  

Please send a letter describing your research interests, a C.V., at
least two letters of reference, and a sample of your scholarly work to
Lara Birk, Center for Basic Research in the Social Sciences, 34
Kirkland Street, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138; email:
lbirk at latte.harvard.edu; fax 617-496-5149; phone 617-495-9271.  Please
get your application in by April 10th if possible.  Please refer
any questions you may have to Ms. Birk.

The Principal Investigators for this project are Gary King (Professor
of Government, Harvard; Director, Harvard-MIT Data Center; and Advisor
to the World Health Organization (WHO)) and Christopher Murray
(Director, Global Programme on Evidence for Health Policy, WHO;
Professor of International Health Economics, Harvard School of Public
Health).

The project Advisory Committee includes James Alt (Professor of
Government, Harvard, and Director of CBRSS), Bear Braumoeller
(Assistant Professor of Government, Harvard), Paul E.  Farmer, Jr.
(Associate Professor, Department of Social Medicine, Harvard Medical
School and Director, Institute for Health and Social Justice), Lisa
Martin (Professor of Government, Harvard), Jasjeet Sekhon (Assistant
Professor of Government, Harvard), Kenji Shibuya (Assistant Professor
of Public Health, Teikyo University School of Medicine, Japan), and
Langche Zeng (Associate Professor of Political Science, George
Washington University and CBRSS fellow).

The project is sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation,
Harvard University's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs
(WCFIA), Center for Basic Research in the Social Sciences (CBRSS), and
Harvard-MIT Data Center, and it is in collaboration with the World
Health Organization's Global Programme on Evidence for Health Policy.


     : Gary King, King at Harvard.Edu    http://GKing.Harvard.Edu :
     : Center for Basic Research   Internet Keyword: Gary King :
     :   in the Social Sciences       Direct    (617) 495-2027 :
     : 34 Kirkland Street, Rm. 2      Assistant (617) 495-9271 :
     : Harvard U, Cambridge, MA 02138    eFax   (520) 832-7022 :