Research Coordinator

Research Coordinator

The Climate Communication Division of the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) is a hub for interdisciplinary, translational research on climate communication, resilience, action, and policy which focuses on topics at local scales (e.g., environmental justice initiatives in West Philadelphia), global scales (e.g., the development and evaluation of media campaigns that communicate climate science knowledge), and the neural, psychological and/or sociological mechanisms that motivate belief, attitude, and behavior change, as well as resilience and social connection.

APPC's work in this space aims to educate and co-create scholarship with others across the academy, the public, policymakers, and journalists as key contributors and beneficiaries. The Climate Communication Division's research involves experiments, surveys, computational methods, and neuroimaging.

The Research Coordinator will support ongoing and new interdisciplinary research projects on youth voter engagement, climate action, and resilience, as well as projects related to conversation, neuroimaging, and other topics of interest to the division, in collaboration with community partners. The research coordinator will work with a project team including the PI, staff, postdocs, and graduate students, as well as external collaborators.

The Research Coordinator will provide direct research support to the PI and project team to design, develop, and execute study protocols. This position is an excellent stepping stone for candidates seeking to pursue doctoral training who want to further develop their research skills and expand their CVs. Ideal candidates will already have substantial research experience and a desire to author scientific papers.

Documenting study procedures and maintaining study documentation.

• Leading Institutional Review Board protocol preparation and maintenance.
• Developing data collection and data management protocols.
• Recruiting participants and performing data collection in the field and online.
• Managing project-specific finances including participant payments.
• Managing and curating data, including data cleaning, processing, and quality checking.
• Managing undergraduate Research Assistants and coordinating the project's study team.
• Performing literature searches and reviews.
• Analyzing behavioral and fMRI data and authoring research papers.
• Building and maintaining relationships with community partners.
• Collaborating and conducting research with community partners.
• Providing administrative assistance.

We believe that our science is better with a diverse team. We embrace and encourage our lab members' differences in age, color, disability, ethnicity, family or marital status, gender identity or expression, language, national origin, ability, political affiliation, race, religion, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, veteran status, and other characteristics that make our lab members who they are.

This is a one-year position that will begin summer 2026.

• B.A., with background in psychology, neuroscience, communication science, or a related field.
• 1-2 years of experience of prior research experience in a university setting (e.g., previous lab/research assistant experience) is required.
• Demonstrated ability to lead or coordinate research projects.
• Demonstrated ability to work independently and in a team.
• Excellent organizational, and interpersonal and written communication skills.
• Ability to proactively solve problems with support from the PI and project team.
• Ability to work on multiple tasks and projects with attention to detail.
• Ability to develop solutions to basic technical problems (e.g., with R, Python, Qualtrics.)
• Ability to independently conduct statistical analysis (e.g. in R, SPSS, Matlab, SAS.)
• Previous experience leading scientific papers as first author.
• Interest in climate communication.

• Experience using Qualtrics or other survey software.
• Experience with data management.
• Experience linguistic/natural language processing analysis.
• Experience working with Institutional Review Boards.
• Programming skills (e.g. in R, Python, Matlab.)
• Experience working with fMRI data (e.g. SPM, fsl, AFNI or other imaging analysis package.)

Successful candidates may also have:

• Experience with voter engagement or canvassing.
• Experience working with community partners.
• Experience with and/or interest in conducting action-oriented research to motivate civic engagement and climate action.
• Experience with and/or interest in conducting psychological network analysis.
• Previous experience in social/cognitive neuroscience or communication research fields
• Experience with open science practices/reproducibility, including version control (e.g., git/github.)
• Successful publication record.