Career Center

The Pepper Institute on Aging and Public Policy at Florida State University is recruiting a Postdoctoral Fellow for a one-year position (renewable for up to 3 years) beginning August 2026. The Pepper Institute brings together faculty and students from a range of social science, public policy, and health disciplines to examine how social factors, structures, and public policies shape health and well-being in aging societies (https://pepperinstitute.fsu.edu/about-us). The Fellow will work with Dr. Patricia Homan (PI) on an NICHD funded project focused on examining how state-level social and policy environments shape maternal and infant health outcomes in the United States.

The Fellow’s primary responsibility will be the compilation, cleaning, harmonization, and coding of state-level indicators across multiple public data sources to construct a rigorous state-by-year index spanning economic, educational, political, cultural, and health policy domains. This work will culminate in a publicly available dataset with documentation and replication code, providing a lasting resource for the field. Additional responsibilities include contributing to analyses and publications using fixed-effects panel models, multilevel models, and structural equation modeling to examine how changes in U.S. state contexts relate to maternal and infant health outcomes over the past two decades.

Strong preference will be given to candidates with experience in:

• Building original datasets from multiple secondary data sources
• Data cleaning, harmonization, and reproducible workflows
• Factor analysis, index construction, and measurement validation
• Longitudinal and panel data methods
• Stata, R, and/or Mplus

To apply, email a cover letter, research statement describing their current research experience and their plan for research during the fellowship, and CV with contact information for three references to phoman@fsu.edu.  Review of materials will begin May 8, 2026, but later submissions will be reviewed on a rolling basis until the position is filled. Please note that candidates are also required to submit their materials at https://jobs.fsu.edu.

PhD required (within the past five years) in sociology, demography, public health, policy studies, epidemiology, or a related social or behavioral science. Fellows are expected to publish, collaborate on grants, and engage in Pepper Institute activities.

To apply, email a cover letter, research statement describing their current research experience and their plan for research during the fellowship, and CV with contact information for three references to phoman@fsu.edu.  Review of materials will begin May 8, 2026, but later submissions will be reviewed on a rolling basis until the position is filled. Please note that candidates are also required to submit their materials at https://jobs.fsu.edu.