Research Coordinator

| Raw markdown

tagnames: 'community, research, development, jobs, location:blurred, place:united-states, lat:36, zoom:6, lon:

-79'author: thewrightjesspath: /notes/thewrightjess/01-30-2020/public-lab-job-posting-research-coordinator.mdnid: 22440uid: 603909cids:

by thewrightjess | January 30, 2020 18:53

January 30, 2020 18:53 | Tags: community , research , development , jobs , location:blurred , place:united-states , lat:36 , zoom:6 , lon:

-79

Start Date:

Late March 2020

Location:

Remote within the United States with the opportunity to work from our offices in New Orleans, LA or Brooklyn, NY

Terms:

Full time

Public Lab is a community, supported by a non-profit, that develops and applies open-source tools to environmental exploration and investigation. By democratizing inexpensive and accessible do-it-yourself techniques, Public Lab creates a collaborative network of practitioners who actively reimagine the human relationship with the environment.

Join our team and work to bring about a healthier and more equitable world through community science, open technology, and the pursuit of environmental justice.

This position is ideal for an early- to mid-career science communicator or hardware enthusiast who wants to be embedded in a diverse research community. It's a role for someone deeply curious and empirical who enjoys synthesizing, testing, and growing a body of practical knowledge with people who are striving to address complex problems together.

The Research Coordinator is part of Public Lab's Organizing & Research team, which ensures that people who come to Public Lab in pursuit of environmental justice are able to connect with others online and/or in-person to achieve locally meaningful outcomes. The Research Coordinator will build working relationships with scientists and technologists developing accessible environmental research methods, and community members who use them to monitor the environment, ensuring information is clearly presented on the Public Lab website.

The Research Coordinator works to maintain environmental health topic pages on the website that succinctly present the current state of methodologies for monitoring or remediating the issue, and feature accessible pathways for newcomers to get started. Example practices include synthesizing materials into an at-a-glance view of the topic, highlighting activities new contributors can try for themselves, breaking out questions that could be answerable by someone with particular expertise or experience, and framing "next step" challenges to attract a contributor with specific skills sets.

This position will assist the Community Manager in managing fellowship teams working on specific research areas, coordinating their efforts, and editing their outputs to support further growth in the broader contributor community. This position will work with the Education and Kits teams to source and distribute hardware needed by frontline communities. This position works closely with Public Lab directors to meet strategic objectives for advancing the readiness of community science approaches to key environmental health issues.

This position reports to the Community Manager. This job requires occasional travel and work outside regular business hours.

• Maintain coherence in a priority set of environmental research topics on the Public Lab website
• Organize a regular practice of reviewing these environmental research topics by:
  • Collating and synthesizing materials shared by people working deeply on environmental topics to make them accessible for those who are exploring these issues as newcomers
  • Understanding, breaking down, prioritizing, and communicating steps to approaching environmental monitoring challenges on the website and through on/offline events, in a way that helps people see where they may make a contribution
  • Explaining what is currently within reach for key environmental health issues, at what cost of time and energy to get what quality of data, and usable for which purposes
  • Inviting people to contribute feedback, failures, requests, and ideas about environmental topic areas, with support from other program staff
  • Building relationships with people doing this work, and conducting interviews to tell their stories (with support from the Communications Manager)
  • Supporting fellows in their work, specifically around developing resources on environmental monitoring methods and hardware projects so…