Director, RAND Pardee Center for Longer Range Global Policy and the Future Human Condition

Job Type:

Position Description 

Overview 

In today’s world of fast-paced change, good policy analysis is more vital than ever but often more difficult to provide. To help address this challenge, the Pardee Center serves as RAND’s laboratory for innovation associated with Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty (DMDU). The Director uses the Pardee Center’s funding to assemble teams and catalyze research into enhanced methods, to seed new projects enabled by these methods, and to disseminate DMDU methods within and outside RAND. The Pardee Center sits within RAND’s Global and Emerging Risks (GER) division and engages with the whole of RAND.  

The Pardee Center Director position provides an exciting opportunity for a creative, collaboration-oriented researcher to make a major contribution to the future of policy analysis and to further expand the DMDU community of interest within and beyond RAND.  The Center’s endowment supports about one person year annually of discretionary funding to allocate in pursuit of the Center’s goals. Center funds provide about 35% to 40% coverage for the Director for research, outreach, business development, and Center management.  The Director allocates the remainder of the Center’s annual funding to fellow RAND staff to assist with these goals. The Director is expected spend the remainder of their time on other research projects, some run by the Center and others run by GER and other RAND divisions. The Center regards DMDU methods as central to GER’s and RAND’s work in longer-term policy analysis as well as to RAND’s research on systems transitions, systemic risk, and analytic deliberative processes of stakeholder engagement. The Center values both conceptual research that advances scientific understanding as well as hands on work with concrete policy impacts. 

Specific responsibilities include: 

• Proven ability to develop and fund a research agenda 

• Conducting pilot research projects 

• Scholarly and general audience publications 

• Concept development and fund-raising 

• Staff development particularly for early career staff 

• Holding conferences and workshops 

• Liaising with the international DMDU community, and speaker series 

Qualifications 

• Expert in DMDU theory and practice 

• Strong research background and reputation 

• Specialist in one or more policy research areas in which DMDU plays a strong role 

• Ability to work in multiple policy research areas using both analytic and qualitative methods 

• Ability to foster both scholarly research and practical policy impacts 

• Strong teaching abilities for students and practitioners 

• Strong outreach abilities 

Education Requirements 

Master's or PhD in a related field