Senior Tenure/Tenure-Track Faculty, School of Social Work

Senior Tenure/Tenure-Track Faculty, School of Social Work
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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Primary Purpose of Organizational Unit
The mission of the School of Social Work is to advance equity, transform systems, and improve lives. The School’s curriculum supports the mission and recognizes the uniqueness of the region served, including concerns for disadvantaged, vulnerable, and oppressed individuals, families, and communities. Classes provide rigorous and evidence-based content, and give students the opportunity to explore theory, learn intervention skills and engage in challenging dialogue with colleagues. The School works to become the leading school of social work for impact – generating knowledge with powerful and positive consequences.

The School of Social Work offers M.S.W. and Ph.D. degrees. Dual degrees are offered in Law, Public Health, Public Administration, and Divinity (with Duke University). The faculty members of the School of Social Work have strong collaborative relationships with many campus units such as the Schools of Medicine, Public Health, Nursing, Law, Government, Education, and the Department of City and Regional Planning as well as University Centers and Institutes such as the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research, the Carolina Population Center, the Center for Developmental Sciences, Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute, and the Institute on Aging. We also maintain dynamic relationships with community agencies, state and federal government, and research groups in the Research Triangle Park and across the U.S.

To learn more about the School of Social Work, please visit our website at https://ssw.unc.edu/

Position Summary
The School of Social Work (SSW) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill invites applications for a mid-career/senior level tenured/tenure-track faculty position (9-month) with a primary focus on advanced research methodology and analytic innovation relevant to social work practice and policy.

Consistent with the School of Social Work’s mission to advance equity, transform systems, and improve lives, we seek applicants with a demonstrated capacity to develop, refine, and apply rigorous quantitative and/or mixed methods approaches that inform the design, implementation, and evaluation of interventions, programs, or policies. Successful applicants will join a community of active scholars with a vision to be the leading school of social work for accelerating discovery and the translation of knowledge into action. Candidates will be expected to engage in all aspects of faculty life: research, teaching, and service and must have the capacity to obtain and maintain external funding to support their work.

The faculty member’s academic home will be the School of Social Work, where they will collaborate with interdisciplinary teams across medicine, education, psychology, public health, data science, and related fields. We are particularly interested in scholars who advance methodological frontiers, such as causal inference, complex systems modeling, implementation science, longitudinal or big-data analytics, community-engaged methods and who can apply these tools to pressing social problems.

This position holds a primary tenure-track/tenured appointment as a faculty within SSW, and as such, candidates should have an exceptional record of externally funded research, publications, and teaching. Tenure-track and tenured faculty within SSW have a teaching courseload of 4 courses per academic year. This position has a standard distribution of effort that includes 67% teaching and instruction, 16.5% research, and 16.5% service and community engagement. The person holding this position will play a leadership role within the School to support faculty research and development; as such, course releases enabling the work will be negotiated with the Dean.

We seek a mid-career or senior methodologist who will teach advanced statistical and advanced research design methods in our doctoral program and provide School-wide methodological leadership, especially in designing, implementing, and evaluating clinical trials and other complex research projects.

Key Responsibilities:

1. Doctoral Teaching
   * Design and teach PhD-level courses in advanced statistics (e.g. longitudinal and multilevel modeling, measurement/psychometrics, causal inference, Bayesian statistics) and advanced research design methods

2. Methodological Leadership & Consultation
   * Partner with Associate Dean for Research to consult with faculty and students to plan rigorous studies, including clinical trials, cluster-randomized designs, hybrid designs (effectiveness-implementation hybrid studies), and analysis of administrative data
   * Lead or contribute to grant applications (e.g. NIH/NSF/Foundations) by developing study designs, randomization plans, power analysis; and by strengthening rigor and reproducibility
   * Support protocol development, trial registration, and data safety and monitoring considerations
   * Offer faculty and student workshops and ‘methods clinics’ that translate advanced methodologies for applied audiences in social work
   * Support school initiatives that enhance the quality of statistical analysis and research rigor.

3. Research
   *Maintain an independent, externally funded research program

Minimum Education and Experience Requirements

• Doctoral degree (e.g., Social Work, Public Health, Statistics/Biostatistics, Epidemiology, Psychology, Economics, Education, or related field).
• Demonstrated excellence in externally funded research and a strong publication record commensurate with rank.
• Capacity to teach and consult on advanced statistics and advanced research design at the doctoral level and mentor researchers.
• Evidence of successful collaborations, e.g. complex studies, including clinical trials or other rigorous designs.
• Proficiency with major statistical software (e.g., R, Stata, SAS; Python a plus) and reproducible research practices.

Preferred Qualifications, Competencies, and Experience

• Depth pragmatic/adaptive/cluster trials; implementation science; causal inference; longitudinal and multilevel models; missing-data methods; psychometrics/measurement invariance;
• Experience leading or contributing to a methods core, center, or multi-site team.
• Demonstrated ability to translate complex methods for interdisciplinary, practice-oriented audiences.
• Commitment to community-engaged and responsive research (e.g., inclusive sampling, bias-aware measures/analytics).
• Degrees in Social Work are highly valued but not required.

Special Instructions
Candidates should electronically upload a CV, a cover letter outlining interest and prior experience, a research, teaching, and service statement, and include four to five references with their institution, email, and phone number. The service statement should be uploaded as “Other Document.” Optional document uploads may include teaching evaluations and/or sample course materials (i.e., syllabus, assignments, or sample lecture notes).

Please apply online at https://unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/307535

The University is an equal opportunity employer and welcomes all to apply without regard to age, color, gender, gender expression, gender identity, genetic information, national origin, race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation. We encourage all qualified applicants to apply, including protected veterans and individuals with disabilities.