Position Summary
The Information Systems and Technology area in the Business Division at NYU Shanghai is hiring a full-time Pre-Doctoral Research Associate. The position is one to two years of research work with a faculty advisor. Its purpose is to prepare you for a strong PhD program: real research experience, and letters from people who have seen your work closely.
You would work with one faculty member as your primary advisor, on that advisor’s active projects, as a junior colleague rather than as someone completing assigned tasks. Some of those projects come from collaborations with other NYU campuses, with other universities, and with industry, including leading technology companies.
This is the first year of the program in our area, so we cannot yet show you a placement record. The first group receives something that becomes rare once a program is larger: you would be one of only a few research associates, and you would work with your advisor directly rather than behind several other assistants. The first group’s PhD admissions will also become the record by which this program is judged. Our interest in your applications is therefore the same as your own.
Who you would work with
Bruno Abrahao, Associate Professor of Information Systems and Business Analytics — AI for business, deep learning and large language models, and data science for organizations and digital platforms. brunoabrahao.com
Read a paper by the person you want to work with and explain in your cover letter what you would like to study next. The final match is decided during the interviews.
What the work is
Literature search, data cleaning, standard estimation, and a first draft of the writing are now largely automated, and we expect the Research Associate to use LLMs well. What we are hiring for is the judgment that LLMs do not provide:
turning an interest into a research question and choosing a design to answer it;
noticing inconsistencies and problems in analyses;
noticing that a result is an artifact of how the data were constructed, sampled, or merged;
reading a literature and identifying the few relevant papers that position our contribution;
verifying a claim against the original source instead of accepting a plausible answer;
theoretical development of a research piece;
building and running analyses, preparing manuscripts, attending seminars, giving talks.
What we care about is critical thinking that lets you see when a result is wrong.
Nobody can do all this on arrival. That is the purpose of the position: you will learn it on real projects from someone whose own work depends on getting the answer right.
What you get
Aspecific letter . Your advisor writes your PhD recommendation letters and will review your statement of purpose and your list of programs with you.
Co-authorship when you earn it . A substantial contribution to a paper, to its design, its analysis, or its argument, makes you an author.
Computing . Access to high-performance computing resources, including GPUs.
Training on real problems rather than exercises : research design, methods, and academic writing. Databases and participation in a seminar series.
Shanghai, and the NYU network . NYU Shanghai is one of New York University’s three degree-granting campuses, and it teaches in English. Both above advisors also hold appointments and collaborations at NYU Stern.
Qualifications
Who should apply
Computer science, data science, information systems, statistics and econometrics, economics, related fields in empirical, theoretical, or computational forms. We are looking for candidates who:
can read a research paper critically, state what it contributes, and where it is weak;
are proficient in Python and learn new tools and languages when a problem requires them;
are careful with evidence: they verify results and say so when a result does not survive checking;
write and speak clearly enough to be understood by people outside their own project;
want to become independent researchers, not just…