Research Assistant

About the Opportunity

Research Assistant

Network Science Institute

This role is based at One Portsoken, Portsoken Street, London E1 8PH
(Hybrid role). Hybrid working is available by arrangement with the Principal Investigator, with a minimum of three days per week on-site to support close collaboration with the wider project team.

Full-time for 3 years starting 4th of January 2027

£43,555 - £46,195 per annum, depending on experience

The university supports staff maintaining a good work/life balance, offering flexible working and parental leaveopportunities, an Employee Assistance Programmeaswell asoptional private medical insurance, season ticket loans anda cycle to work scheme. Tuition fee remission is also available.

Employees are automatically enrolled in the University’s pension scheme with a minimum 4% contribution. They may also join the Salary Sacrifice plan to make additional tax efficient pension contributions. The University matches 4% as standard, rising to 8% maximum for higher contributions. Employees can tailor their contributions with support from an appointed independent financial advisor.

None – this is an individual contributor role with no line-management responsibilities.

Prof István Z. Kiss (Principal Investigator) and Dr Andreia Sofia Teixeira (Co-Investigator)

4th of January 2027

This is a rare opportunity to join a pioneering, three-year Leverhulme Trust-funded project that reimagines how epidemic models capture real human behaviour, bringing together mathematical epidemiology, agent-based modelling, and contemporary social and health psychology to fundamentally rethink how we predict and respond to disease outbreaks.

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the limits of epidemic models that treat human behaviour as an afterthought. This project, “Rethinking Epidemic Models:
Integrating Human Behaviour and Psychology”, moves beyond simplistic rational-choice or imitation-based assumptions to build models grounded in how people make decisions, through their social identities, group norms, and personal risk judgements. The Leverhulme Trust, one of the UK’s most prestigious funders of “original and adventurous research”, has backed this genuinely interdisciplinary approach, which challenges the boundaries of mathematical epidemiology and social psychology alike.

You will be based at the Network Science Institute part of Northeastern University London, a vibrant, growing centre for network science, sitting within a wider Institute that also has a presence in Boston and Portland, Maine, with regular exchange of ideas.

• Work at the leading edge of a genuinely new field, designing and building an agent-based modelling (ABM) platform that couples disease transmission with psychologically-grounded behavioural rules – work that will directly shape how future pandemics are modelled and managed.
• Join a truly international, multi-institutional, interdisciplinary team:
  Professor István Kiss and Dr Andreia Sofia Teixeira at the Network Science Institute, NU London, Professor John Drury at the University of Sussex (a participant in the UK Government’s SPI-B group during COVID-19), and Dr Marijn Stok at Utrecht University/RIVM (formerly of the Dutch Corona Behaviour Unit).
• Help build genuinely open science: you will develop and prepare for public release an open-source ABM platform, with your code and methods used and cited well beyond the life of the project.
• Publish in leading interdisciplinary journals and present your work both to network science and psychology audiences (e.g. Net Sci, the European Health Psychology Society) and to the multi-agent systems and AI community (e.g. AAMAS, IJCAI) — since a well-built ABM platform has real value and visibility in the computer science world too.
• Build connections across network science, epidemiology, and psychology through regular exchanges with colleagues at Sussex and Utrecht.

• Design and develop a comprehensive agent-based modelling (ABM) platform that integrates…