Research Data Analysts

Lab Overview

The Prison Education Action Research Lab (PEARL) at the College of Education, University of Utah, is the nation’s first center dedicated to advancing research, data, and leadership in postsecondary education in prison. Funded by an $8 million award from Ascendium Education Group, PEARL leverages evidence‑based research to change systems and reduce barriers to postsecondary education for people directly impacted by the criminal legal system.

PEARL’s anchor project, the Prison Education Research Initiative (PERI), is a first‑of‑its‑kind multi‑institutional longitudinal study spanning 22+ partner colleges and universities nationwide.

PEARL does research that advances educational justice for people and communities impacted by incarceration.

The Research Data Analyst will lead the secure acquisition, organization, documentation, preparation, integration, and analysis of complex multi‑site administrative and research datasets for PEARL’s national longitudinal study. Key responsibilities include multi‑institution data management, relational database development, data infrastructure, data cleaning pipelines, quality assurance, reporting, and reproducible analytics. The role supports principal investigators, institutional partners, and research staff in transforming raw data into analysis‑ready files and outputs, ensuring compliance with data security, IRB, and data‑use agreements.

This position will help build one of the most important national datasets on prison higher education and student outcomes. The successful candidate will play a central role in producing credible evidence that informs policy, expands opportunity, and improves lives.

• Support development of data collection, data management, and analysis plans.
• Develop data collection instruments, tools, and templates for state and institutional administrative data and student and institutional surveys, adjusting tools and instruments for local and state contexts where relevant.
• Coordinate secure receipt of data files from partner institutions and agencies.
• Maintain organized folder structures, file naming conventions, and version control practices.
• Ensure data storage, access, and handling procedures comply with IRB approvals, University policy, and data‑use agreements.
• Design, build, document, own, and maintain the project relational database and related data infrastructure.
• Develop and manage data pipelines for ingesting, transforming, and integrating multi‑institution administrative and research data.
• Clean, validate, standardize, recode, integrate, and document raw and inconsistently structured incoming datasets from multiple institutions and external organizations.
• Create and maintain data dictionaries, codebooks, variable crosswalks, and workflow documentation.
• Use Stata to conduct exploratory analyses, descriptive statistics, and statistical analyses.
• Produce reproducible, report‑ready tables, figures, descriptive summaries, and statistical outputs.
• Create targeted dashboards, data visualizations, and reporting tools as supporting products for partner communication.
• Lead scalable data infrastructure planning and implementation in collaboration with project leadership and technical partners.
• Communicate data limitations, assumptions, anomalies, and recommendations clearly.
• Help strengthen best practices in data governance, reproducibility, and research workflow management.
• Support internal reporting, grant deliverables, manuscripts, conference presentations, and ad hoc analytic requests.

• One year of higher education can be substituted for one year of directly related work experience (Example: bachelor’s degree = 4 years of directly related work experience).
• Bachelor’s (or equivalency) + 4 years of directly related work experience or Master’s (or equivalency) + 2 years of directly related work experience for Research Data Analyst II.
• Bachelor’s (or equivalency) + 6 years of directly related work experience or Master’s (or equivalency) + 4 years of directly related work experience for Research Data Analyst III.

• Bachelor’s degree in data science,…