Peter Henne writes:

I wanted to let you know about a new opportunity at Pew Research Center for a data scientist that might be relevant to some of your colleagues.

I [Henne] am a researcher with the Pew Research Center, where I manage an international index on religious issues. I am also working with others at the Center on expanding into more non-survey research areas.

One new initiative that we are starting is the Pew Research Center Labs. The Labs will be a space for researchers to develop and gain access to expertise on new data sets and methods, and experiment with these data and methods to possibly incorporate them into Pew Research Center work. This falls generally in the “big data”/organic data/unstructured data category, while we are also looking at the particular methods needed to deal with this sort of data.

We recently posted an announcement for the Director of the Labs (link below), who would ideally be someone with strong social science-related quantitative/data science skills and management experience. I wanted to send this to you in case you know of anyone who would be interested, or if your blog readers might be interested.

Again, the link is here. Particular skills needed include “Experience working with large data sets in relational databases and/or Hadoop, and creating reproducible analysis in languages like R and Python.”

This looks really cool, and it’s a great sign that Pew is starting up this lab. Exciting stuff.