Student Assistant Position, The Social Resilience Lab

The Social Resilience Lab, School of Culture and Society, is looking to hire a student assistant for a 22 month period to assist with computational data analysis, network analysis and agent-based modelling for the ERC project The Model City – Drivers and Mechanisms of Long-Term Urban Evolution and Resilience, the Carlsberg Foundation Past Social Networks Project, and the EU project European Cities 2.

The period of employment is from 1 September 2026 to 30 June 2028.

The student assistant will be affiliated with the Social Resilience Lab, led by Associate Professor Iza Romanowska and Associate Professor Tom Brughmans. You can read more about the lab here: https://cas.au.dk/en/social-resilience-lab 

Tasks:

·  Mining and extracting structured data from academic literature and historical sources, as well as web-based corpora and datasets using large language models (LLMs) and other computational text-analysis tools
·  Cleaning, analysing and visualising complex, heterogeneous datasets. The tasks will be highly diverse spanning ancient urban systems, historical records, and contemporary political and social data
·  Contributing to the design and implementation of agent-based simulation models and computational experiments
·  Conducting network analysis on datasets including co-authorship networks, historical networks, and political interaction data
·  Assisting in the design of behavioural experiments, including studies of opinion dynamics, voting behaviour, and alternative voting methods
·  Supporting other researchers in the group with computational tasks, including the development and maintenance of shared computational infrastructure, scripts and workflows
·  Contributing to documentation, data management and open-science practices in line with FAIR principles

Qualifications:

·  Enrolled in a relevant degree programme in computational social science, such as, cognitive science, political science, data science, digital humanities, computer science, or a related field
· Extensive practical experience with Python or R, including data wrangling, statistical analysis and visualisation (e.g. pandas, matplotlib, ggplot2 or equivalent)
·  Familiarity with large language models, and their application to text mining and information extraction tasks, including web scraping
·  Experience with network analysis methods and tools (e.g. NetworkX, igraph, Gephi)
·  Prior experience in agent-based modelling or simulation-based approaches to social and historical research
·  Ability to work independently, manage multiple tasks across different projects, and communicate findings clearly to an interdisciplinary team
·  Curiosity about questions spanning urban history, social complexity, political behaviour, and computational methods

The position averages 10 hours per week, but the workload may vary.

Please submit a short, motivated application explaining why you are interested in the position and why you would be a good fit, and include your CV.

For further information about the position, please contact Tom Brughmans Tom Brughmans t.b@cas.au.dk or Iza Romanowska iromanowska@cas.au.dk.

Salary and terms of employment

In accordance with the current collective agreement between the Danish Ministry of Finance and HK STAT.

Aarhus University’s ambition is to be an attractive and inspiring workplace for all and to foster a culture in which each individual has opportunities to thrive, achieve and develop. We view equality and diversity as assets, and we welcome all applicants.

About Arts

The Faculty of Arts is one of Northern Europe’s most significant faculties for research and higher education in the humanities, theology and education. Within this broad academic scope, the faculty comprises approximately 700 researchers, 200 PhD students, 9,000 Bachelor’s and Master’s degree students, and 1,500 further and continuing education students. We believe that the best ideas arise when different perspectives meet – and that research, teaching and innovation are best developed in dialogue with the surrounding society.

You can find more information here: Faculty of Arts | Aarhus University

The application must be submitted via Aarhus University’s recruitment system, which can be accessed under the job advertisement on Aarhus University's website.
 

Aarhus University

Aarhus University is an academically diverse and research-intensive university with a strong commitment to high-quality research and education and the development of society nationally and globally. The university offers an inspiring research and teaching environment to its 37,000 students (FTEs) and 8.700 employees and has an annual revenue of EUR 1.106 billion. Learn more at www.international.au.dk/