Postdoctoral Scholar in Open Science Infrastructure and Data Integration
Hart Lab / LDbase, School of Psychology, University of Waterloo | Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Position Description
A Postdoctoral Scholar position is available with Sara Hart, Canada Excellence Research Chair in Developmental Science and Professor of Psychology, in the Hart Lab in the School of Psychology at the University of Waterloo. This position is funded through a new five-year NIH-supported project to expand LDbase.org, the domain-specific data repository for the learning and developmental sciences. LDbase holds more than 200 shared datasets, is used by close to 900 registered researchers, and is listed by NIH, IES, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative as a preferred repository.
The successful candidate will lead and collaborate across multiple strands of the project. The first demonstrates the value of data reuse by answering a question that cannot be answered from any single dataset: why do some children grow faster than others in reading? This work uses integrative data analysis to harmonize five longitudinal datasets (N = 5,161, kindergarten through grade twelve), testing measurement invariance at the construct level and then fitting a trivariate latent change score model to examine reciprocal relations among reading decoding, language comprehension, and reading comprehension (see van Dijk et al., 2022 for the harmonization approach the project uses).
The second strand is a program of metascience studies tracking data sharing across the field: harvesting dataset DOIs through the OSF and ICPSR APIs to trace how often shared data are actually reused, coding published articles for open science practices across several years, using NIH RePORTER to compare data sharing before and after the 2023 federal mandate, and other metascience studies on data sharing and data reuse.
The project is also building an application programming interface (API) for LDbase, so that researchers can search, download, and deposit data directly from R or Python. Infrastructure development is led by the Florida State University Libraries team; this role is the research-facing side of that work. The postdoc will be among the API's first users, will help specify what the research community needs from it, and will have the opportunity to lead development of an R client package for LDbase.
The postdoc will also contribute to community-facing work, including workshops, conference presentations, and user research, and will be embedded in an interdisciplinary team spanning the University of Waterloo and Florida State University, with consultants at Vanderbilt University and Utah State University.
