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About the Role

This position blends human dimensions and quantitative wildlife disease research, analyzing stakeholder surveys, designing and facilitating an interagency tabletop exercise, and co-designing communication materials. The role is ideal for someone interested in working at the interface between research and management, and offers opportunities to contribute to other quantitative work on wildlife disease arrival and spread.

Responsibilities

• Analyze three existing statewide CWD stakeholder surveys to quantify knowledge, attitudes, and regulation-relevant behaviors across audiences, and to identify the hunter subpopulations at highest risk of importing CWD into Massachusetts.
• Help design and co-facilitate an in-person, multi-agency tabletop exercise (1.5 day workshop) that simulates CWD detection scenarios and tests the state's reactive response.
• Translate the results of the tabletop exercise into a revised reactive-response section of the state CWD response plan and a positive-detection decision tree that links preventative, surveillance, and reactive actions; ideally, this would also result in a management protocol for other state wildlife agencies on how to structure these tabletop exercises.
• Co-design pre-positioned communication materials with the state agency's outreach and education staff, using the communication channel and trust data from the existing surveys.
• Lead and co-author peer-reviewed manuscripts, write research reports, and prepare code and data for release.
• Work collaboratively and effectively to promote teamwork, equality and inclusiveness.
• Work in partnership with colleagues within the CNS community and across the campus to support the Dean’s strategic priorities.
• Perform other duties as assigned in support of the mission and goals of the College of Natural Sciences.
• Updating and extending the existing decision models to identify effective management actions under alternative modes of CWD arrival.
• Contributing to quantitative modeling of CWD spread and time-to-arrival in the Northeast, in collaboration with the postdoctoral researcher at the University of Vermont.
• Developing and analyzing a One Health survey for state agencies related to communication, jurisdiction, and workflows.
• Developing materials and templates that other CWD-negative states in the region can adapt.

Requirements

• PhD in human dimensions of natural resources, conservation social science, ecology, conservation, epidemiology, wildlife science, or other related field.
• Experience with quantitative analysis in R.
• Evidence of scientific writing, such as published or submitted peer-reviewed manuscripts or technical reports.
• Strong written and oral communication skills, and an ability to work collaboratively with agency partners.

Skills

• Quantitative analysis in R
• Scientific writing
• Written and oral communication
• Collaborative work
• Designing or analyzing surveys of human knowledge, attitudes, or behavior
• Weighted survey analysis
• Ordinal regression
• Facilitating workshops
• Structured decision-making processes
• Tabletop exercises
• Wildlife disease
• Wildlife health
• Wildlife management
• Quantitative modeling
• Bayesian methods
• Decision analysis
• Spatial and epidemiological modeling
• Working with or within state or federal natural resource agencies
• Reproducible workflows
• Version control (Git)

Location

• Amherst, MA

Work Type

• Full Time
• Onsite

Experience Level

• 0-2 years
• 3-4 years
• 5+ years

Education Level

• PhD

Salary/Compensations

• $62,838 (0-2 years experience)
• $66,287 (3-4 years experience)
• $71,033 (5+ years experience)

About the Company

• The University of Massachusetts (UMass) is a top-ranked public university located in western MA. The area offers a rich cultural environment in a rural setting close to major urban centers, with many great outdoor recreational opportunities.
• At UMass Amherst and in CNS, we strive to be a community where every individual feels a sense of belonging, where every individual is included, and where every individual is valued. These values and goals are reflected in the College of Natural Sciences’ Inclusive Excellence framework and in the UMass Amherst’s 2024–2034 Strategic Plan: “For the Common Good.”
• This work is a collaboration among the MA Coop Unit, the USGS Eastern Ecological Science Center, MassWildlife, and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Vermont who is working on complementary modeling of CWD dynamics in the Northeast.

Equal Opportunity

• We highly encourage people from historically underrepresented groups or non-traditional backgrounds to apply.
• At UMass Amherst and in CNS, we strive to be a community where every individual feels a sense of belonging, where every individual is included, and where every individual is valued.