Research Fellow (0.5 - 1.0 FTE)

The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) is one of the world’s leading public health universities. Our mission is to improve health and health equity in the UK and worldwide; working in partnership to achieve excellence in public and global health research, education and translation of knowledge into policy and practice.

The research will advance the use of multiple systems estimations in humanitarian and public health contexts by developing reproducible, multilingual workflows for social media analysis, building data pipelines in R/Python, and creating open-source tools for text and feature extraction. They will also assess and mitigate biases in social media data and design evidence-based heuristics to guide researchers in applying these methods effectively. 

The post-holder must have a postgraduate degree, ideally a doctoral degree, in a relevant topic. The role requires proven expertise in data science or related fields, with strong skills in quantitative analysis applied to large or complex datasets. Candidates should have knowledge of social media data sources, including accessibility, platform characteristics, ethical considerations, and experience developing or applying search strategies and lexicons. Proficiency in fitting and validating statistical models or machine learning algorithms is essential, along with advanced skills in R and/or Python for data processing and analysis. Familiarity with natural language processing techniques, such as text pre-processing (tokenization, stemming/lemmatization) and feature extraction, is also required. Further particulars are included in the job description.

The post may be offered full-time (1.0 FTE, 35 hours per week) or part-time (0.5 FTE, 17.5 hours per week) and is fixed-term until 30 November 2027. The post is funded by NIHR and is available immediately.

The salary will be on the LSHTM salary scale, Grade 6 in the range £45,728-£51,872 per annum pro-rata (inclusive of London Weighting). The post will be subject to the LSHTM terms and conditions of service.  Annual leave entitlement is 30 working days per year, pro rata for part-time staff. In addition to this there are discretionary “Wellbeing Days”. Membership of the Pension Scheme is available. The post is based in London at LSHTM.

Applications should be made by clicking the 'Apply' button above. Online applications will be accepted by the automated system until 10pm of the closing date. Any queries regarding the application process may be addressed to jobs@lshtm.ac.uk. Please quote reference EPH-EPIH-2026-02.

The supporting statement section should set out how your qualifications, experience and training meet each of the selection criteria. Please provide one or more paragraphs addressing each criterion. The supporting statement is an essential part of the selection process and thus a failure to provide this information will mean that the application will not be considered. An answer to any of the criteria such as "Please see attached CV" will not be considered acceptable. 

Please note that if you are shortlisted and are unable to attend on the interview date it may not be possible to offer you an alternative date.

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