Job Description - Research Assistant

China Future City Lab (CFC Lab)

Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT

 

The China Future City Lab (CFC Lab) is seeking a student research assistant with Spatial and Data Analysis education and experience, interest in urban studies, and motivated to work with data from São Paulo (Brazil) and Beijing (China).

Duties & Responsibilities

Providing research assistance on the theme “Infrastructure, Networks and Urban Vibrancy”, one of the three core research themes of CFC Lab. This position will perform a wide range of data manipulation and analysis duties supporting the development of multi-cities comparative study on how transportation shapes the built environment, focused on São Paulo’s and Beijing’s urban context and data.

Activities

• Collecting, manipulating, compiling, and cleaning GIS data on transportation, infrastructure, amenities, and other urban context elements from the city of São Paulo and Beijing.

• Creating data descriptive graphs, maps, charts, and tables.

• Performing first-versions of econometric and spatial data analysis.

• Presenting updates on weekly meeting with principal investigators.

Skills

• Candidates should have programming experience in R for data processing and analysis.

• Candidates should be comfortable working with geographic data in R using packages as “maptools”, “rgeos”, and “sf”.

• Candidates should also have some experience with geoprocessing technologies (e.g., ArcGIS and QGIS software).

Time Status

• Part-time: up to 10 hours per week.

• This position begins immediately and lasts through the spring 2019 semester.

Compensation

• Hourly-payment: $20 per hour worked.

• Weekly timesheet reports that will be approved by principal investigators.

 

Applications should provide a CV and cover letter to abcosta@mit.edu. Application open until filled.