Policy and Research Associate, Georgetown University Initiative on Innovation, Development, and Evaluation (gui2de)

Georgetown University comprises two unique campuses in the nation’s capital. With the Hilltop Campus located in the heart of the historic Georgetown neighborhood, and the Capitol Campus, just minutes from the U.S. Capitol and U.S. Supreme Court, Georgetown University offers rigorous academic programs, a global perspective, and unparalleled opportunities to engage with Washington, D.C. Our community is a close-knit group of remarkable individuals driven by intellectual inquiry, a commitment to social justice, and a shared dedication to making a difference in the world.

Requirements

Job overview

The advertised position is for a Policy and Research Associate (PRA) at gui2de, the Georgetown University Initiative on Innovation, Development, and Evaluation. gui²de is a university-wide research platform jointly convened by the McCourt School of Public Policy and the Economics Department. Our mission is to address poverty and insecurity in low and middle-income countries by incubating solutions, rigorously testing them in the field, and working with local partners to scale what works. Our work spans faculty affiliates across five Georgetown schools, operational and analytical staff in Washington, DC, and East Africa, and students who work alongside us in the field.

The PRA will work closely with Professor Jishnu Das and other members of the team. We are a small and collaborative group. Our work is built around a weekly group meeting. During the meeting, each team member provides updates on their workstreams, receives feedback from the group, and finalizes tasks for the following week. The meetings are in-person and not optional. Following the meeting, everyone does their own thing–but typically, there are many conversations and ideas bounced around during the week as well. No one is on their own, and everyone is usually a door knock or a phone call away. In general, we also try to do something outside of work once a month.

Very Important: We are looking for someone who will commit to remaining with us for at least 2 years, preferably 3 years. Please consider that commitment seriously at the time of application.

In order to facilitate the best possible match, in what follows we specify the kinds of tasks for which we require support. In general, you need to be independent, passionate about education and health, good at communication and messaging, fantastic at analysis, and happy to travel.

The Basics

We have a portfolio of academic work on health and education at various stages of completion. We do not need you to contribute to these off the bat, but if you are willing to jump in, that’s even better. What we need you to do is several things that complement or build on this work.

Example 1

We have a paper showing how investments in foundational literacy and numeracy increase later-life earnings. You can see presentations of this work here, here, and here.  We need to disseminate this well. This means two things:

1.       Design, edit, and coordinate public-facing outputs to disseminate our results on FLN. These could be fairly complex things, like whiteboard animations, where you would have to manage a contracted firm.

2.       Manage timelines, donor relationships, and deliverables.

3.       Perhaps co-author, or solo author, your own writing around these. You could publish these on your own–we have outlets, or perhaps you have your own Substack.

4.       Bring in and scrape additional data as necessary to build out these estimates for others.

Example 2

We are planning a multi-institutional collaboration to build a guidance document/website around investing in private schools in low-income countries. Here you would: 

1.       Manage stakeholders, which includes drafting responses to technical queries on the literature (for instance, we just did power calculations for one group, wrote a note on how to think of surrogate outcomes for another group, etc.)

2.       Participate in the writing of the report, or the development of the website, including summaries of the literature, explanations of the work that already exists, scraping new data on private school location, putting toget