Dear graduate students,
We want to make you aware of opportunities for young researchers in metascience, or the scientific study of the scientific process itself. This is a relatively young and (in our opinion) exciting area of work. We are involved as co-chairs of the Science for Progress Initiative (SfPI) at J-PAL as well as various other field-building activities (e.g. Heidi co-organizes the Innovation Research Boot Camp at the NBER).
SfPI can support you…
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If you need help finding a partner to develop and implement a research idea. For example, we could connect you with Learning Collider, an organization with a large network of tech platforms and school districts; with holders of administrative data on learning outcomes in STEM fields; and with organizations aiming to better understand how changes in high skilled immigration affect the US economy. As two examples, we previously connected two SfPI researchers with Math Circles of Chicago to pursue opportunities to evaluate their student programs, and connected two PhD students with an organization interested in designing a randomized experiment to shed light on how O-1A visas (that is, visas for individuals with “extraordinary ability”) affect where researchers live (including in the US versus abroad), where they work, and other outcomes.
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If you need funding to conduct experimental work on SfPI topics (see below). You can apply for up to $50K at any time through our off-cycle call. Both PhD students who have a formal thesis committee that includes a J-PAL affiliate or invited researcher and pre-thesis PhD students who do not yet have an official thesis committee are eligible. This J-PAL network researcher does not need to be at the PhD student’s university. We respond to LOIs within 2 days and full proposals within two weeks. As with all research at J-PAL, we fund randomized evaluations.
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If you need help designing a potential RCT, we can provide research management support.
If you are interested in learning more about any of these opportunities, or have other questions about how to get started doing high-impact work in this area, reach out to McKenzie Leier (mleier@povertyactionlab.org).
For context, SfPI primarily focuses on three key questions:
- Science funding: what structures are most effective for supporting science?
- Technology transfer: how can we encourage the diffusion of socially valuable discoveries?
- Talent identification and cultivation: how can we ensure talented individuals aren’t discouraged from pursuing science?
The list of SfPI’s funded projects and its blog will give you a concrete sense of some of the kinds of work we are interested in supporting, though—because we are still in the early days—they represent only a small subset of the set of things we think would be exciting.
