University College of London is seeking a Research Fellow (grade 7—short-term postdoc) or research assistant (grade 6—PhD student) to work on a project that will use quantitative and qualitative text analysis techniques to analyse the “climate policy paradigms” implicit in pre-legislative climate policy documents produced by the European Commission (EC). The aim is to understand the ideological foundations of EU climate policy—including variation over time and between EC directorates and agencies—and their congruence with civil society visions for a rapid and socially just energy transition.
This is part of a Horizon Europe and UKRI-funded project “Advancing the understanding of challenges, policy options and measures to achieve a JUST EU energy transition” (AdJUST). You will work with Dr Fergus Green (Department of Political Science, University College London) and Dr Marion Dumas (Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change & the Environment, London School of Economics & Political Science) to produce a research paper targeting a leading journal, and an associated report to the European Commission, on this topic.
You will initially be contracted as a Research Fellow or Research Assistant (depending whether you apply as a PhD student or postdoc) for an agreed term to undertake the data collection and analysis. Subject to satisfactory performance, you will have the opportunity to be a coauthor of the paper and report (which may entail some additional, unpaid work beyond the contracted period).
The key tasks you will need to undertake include:
- Refining the research design, data collection process, and methodologies for the project;
- Collecting and creating a corpus of relevant EC pre-legislative policy documents;
- Programming a computational model (e.g. a BERT model) to filter the corpus for further analysis by a Large Language Model (LLM);
- Prompt engineering and execution—optimising prompts for the LLM to analyse the documents to ascertain the implicit climate policy paradigms (for each paradigm, Dr Green and Dr Dumas will develop a short description; you do not need to have expertise in climate policy, though this is desirable);
- Designing and supporting a validation process;
- Analysing the results (i.e. outputting descriptive statistics regarding prevalence and trends of different paradigms);
- Writing up the results/analysis sections of the paper.
You will have the following skills/qualifications:
Essential skills/qualifications:
- PhD or Masters Degree (current PhD student) in a relevant field of social science (e.g., political science, public policy) or social-science research methods;
- Advanced skills in, and experience in conducting independent research using, quantitative text analysis for social science; a keen interest in staying abreast of rapid developments in the use of LLMs;
- Fluency in English.
Desirable skills/qualifications:
- Experience using quantitative text analysis to infer meta-constructs (e.g., ideologies, values, causal assumptions, policy paradigms etc.) from texts;
- Expertise in climate change politics or policy.
The role will be offered at either:
- Grade 7, spinal point 31 (postdoc)—440 hours at ₤23.37 per hour;
- Grade 6, spinal point 25 (PhD student research assistant)—for 500 hours at ₤20.29
per hour.
In each case, the preferred start time is mid-late June 2025, with a preference for a full-time 2-3 month work schedule, though there is a degree of flexibility as to the start date, time frame and intensity of the work schedule—subject to the requirement that the work would need to be completed by 31 December 2025 at the latest. Applicants should clearly indicate whether they are applying at Grade 6 or grade 7 level, and their preferred working period and time structure (e.g., “0.5 FTE from date X to date Y”).
Remote working is possible (though the applicant must be based in the UK).
Applications should consist of the following documents:
- a cover letter of no more than one page setting out the applicant’s interest in the
project and addressing the skills/qualifications criteria; and - a CV of no more than two pages.
Both documents should be written in English and sent to fergus.green@ucl.ac.uk and M.Dumas1@lse.ac.uk by 11.59pm British Summer Time on Friday 30 May 2025.
